Define the Standard Model gauge group to be S ( U ( 2) × U ( 3)), the subgroup of SU ( 5) consisting of block diagonal matrices with a 2 × 2 block and then a 3 × 3 block. (This is isomorphic to the ...

I don’t really think mathematics is boring. I hope you don’t either. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve launched into reading a math paper, dewy-eyed and eager to learn, only to have my ...

I move jobs tomorrow: from Glasgow to Edinburgh, city of James Clerk Maxwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Dolly the Sheep. But before I go, I want to give you the fourth and final ...

Most recently, the Applied Category Theory Seminar took a step into linguistics by discussing the 2010 paper Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning, by Bob Coecke ...

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 ...

Last summer my students Brendan Fong and Blake Pollard visited me at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, and we figured out how to understand open continuous-time Markov chains! I think this is a ...

Example: suppose we have a data structure representing an abstract address. An address is, alternatively, an email address or a postal address like in the previous example. We can try to extract a ...

I want to talk about some attempts to connect the Standard Model of particle physics to the octonions. I should start out by saying I don’t have any big agenda here. It’d be great if the octonions — ...

It’s an underappreciated fact that the interior of every simplex Δ n \Delta^n is a real vector space in a natural way. For instance, here’s the 2-simplex with twelve of its 1-dimensional linear ...

Bless British trains. A two-hour delay with nothing to occupy me provided the perfect opportunity to figure out the relationships between some of the results that John, Tobias and I have come up with ...

I’m working with Todd Trimble and Joe Moeller on categories and representation theory, and I’ve run into this question: Of course if this is actually false that would explain my puzzlement. But I ...

Summer saw the foundations of mathematics rocked by the publication of The HoTT Book. Here we are a few months later and the same has happened to physics with the appearance on the ArXiv of Urs’s ...