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Friday, November 04, 2005
Wow, I am teh suxorz. Two weeks and I couldn't manage to post my thoughts about the second day of the Category theory conference. Well, here it is, quite belated...
Oktoberfest Day Two
The first three lectures of the day were incredible. There were by: Lawvere, Lambek, and Freyd. Freyd of "Freyd's Adjoint Theorem", Lambek of the million and one applications of category theory, and Lawvere of the, well, pretty much everything ever invented in category theory. In other words, these were the heavy hitters.
Lawvere's talk was typically wacky: he argued that we should start considering three valued (false, negation, and true) logic instead of simply two valued (false, true) logic. I didn't quite follow his reasoning, but it seemed quite interesting...Lambek's talk was also wacky, but in a very different way. It showed how the notion of adjoints characterizes complexity in linguistic and physics applications. Awesome. And Freyd's talk was quite breathless; he seemed to believe that in the last few days he had proved something very important, that "should have been discovered years ago", in general, it was also quite interesting.
More important, however, than the talks themselves was the fact that here I saw mathematicians in their 80's doing interesting and relevant research. Ever since I read "A Mathematician's Apology" by Hardy I have been yearning to find such an example of "old" people managing to do mathematics. In his book, Hardy makes it seem as though once you are past 35 you have no hope of accomplishing anything interesting. Not so, seeing these guys talk...
The other interesting part of the day was randomly running into and old friend from high school. It was good to talk to him again. Especially interesting, however, was his story of being kicked off Via trains because of his kirpan. Amusingly enough, I then read an article about the incident on cbc.ca the following Tuesday.
All in all, a very good conference. My only regret was that I was too shy to talk to anyone except people I already knew. Oh well, next time. (The next major category theory conference, of all places, is going to be about 100 km south of Halifax. Go figure).
Oktoberfest Day Two
The first three lectures of the day were incredible. There were by: Lawvere, Lambek, and Freyd. Freyd of "Freyd's Adjoint Theorem", Lambek of the million and one applications of category theory, and Lawvere of the, well, pretty much everything ever invented in category theory. In other words, these were the heavy hitters.
Lawvere's talk was typically wacky: he argued that we should start considering three valued (false, negation, and true) logic instead of simply two valued (false, true) logic. I didn't quite follow his reasoning, but it seemed quite interesting...Lambek's talk was also wacky, but in a very different way. It showed how the notion of adjoints characterizes complexity in linguistic and physics applications. Awesome. And Freyd's talk was quite breathless; he seemed to believe that in the last few days he had proved something very important, that "should have been discovered years ago", in general, it was also quite interesting.
More important, however, than the talks themselves was the fact that here I saw mathematicians in their 80's doing interesting and relevant research. Ever since I read "A Mathematician's Apology" by Hardy I have been yearning to find such an example of "old" people managing to do mathematics. In his book, Hardy makes it seem as though once you are past 35 you have no hope of accomplishing anything interesting. Not so, seeing these guys talk...
The other interesting part of the day was randomly running into and old friend from high school. It was good to talk to him again. Especially interesting, however, was his story of being kicked off Via trains because of his kirpan. Amusingly enough, I then read an article about the incident on cbc.ca the following Tuesday.
All in all, a very good conference. My only regret was that I was too shy to talk to anyone except people I already knew. Oh well, next time. (The next major category theory conference, of all places, is going to be about 100 km south of Halifax. Go figure).