How do you count rooted planar n -ary trees with some number of leaves? For n = 2 this puzzle leads to the Catalan numbers. These are so fascinating that the combinatorist Richard Stanley wrote a ...

Last time I began explaining how a chunk of combinatorics is categorified ring theory. Every structure you can put on finite sets is a species, and the category of species is the free symmetric 2-rig ...

These are some lecture notes for a 4 1 2 -hour minicourse I’m teaching at the Summer School on Algebra at the Zografou campus of the National Technical University of Athens. To save time, I am ...

The monoid of n × n n \times n matrices has an obvious n n -dimensional representation, and you can get all its representations from this one by operations that you can apply to any representation. So ...

Despite the “2” in the title, you can follow this post without having read part 1. The whole point is to sneak up on the metricky, analysisy stuff about potential functions from a categorical angle, ...

In Part 1, I explained my hopes that classical statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics in the limit where Boltzmann’s constant k k approaches zero. In Part 2, I explained exactly what I mean ...

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...

In this year’s edition of the Adjoint School we covered the paper Triangulations, orientals, and skew monoidal categories by Stephen Lack and Ross Street, in which the authors construct a concrete ...

is always an isomorphism. The above definition is justified by the following: Theorem: A multicategory 𝒞 is isomorphic to M (𝒟) for some monoidal category 𝒟 if and only if it is representable. (we ...

Outline of this blog Throughout this blog post, we will present many of the ideas in the paper “String Diagrams for lambda calculi and Functional Computation” by Dan R. Ghica and Fabio Zanasi from ...

(Jointly written by Astra Kolomatskaia and Mike Shulman) This is part two of a three part series of expository posts on our paper Displayed Type Theory and Semi-Simplicial Types. In this part, we ...

I’ve long been fascinated by the relation between ‘classical’ and ‘quantum’. One way this manifests is the relation between cartesian monoidal categories (like the category of sets with its cartesian ...