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April 16, 2025
Position in Stellenbosch
Posted by John Baez
guest post by Bruce Bartlett
Stellenbosch University is hiring!
April 15, 2025
Categorical Linguistics in Quanta
Posted by Tom Leinster
Quanta magazine has just published a feature on Tai-Danae Bradley and her work, entitled
Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us.
The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.
It’s a nicely set up Q&A, with questions like “What’s something category theory lets you see that you can’t otherwise?” and “How do you use category theory to understand language?”
Particularly interesting for me is the part towards the end where Bradley describes her work with Juan Pablo Vigneaux on magnitude of enriched categories of texts.
April 7, 2025
Quantum Ellipsoids
Posted by John Baez
With the stock market crash and the big protests across the US, I’m finally feeling a trace of optimism that Trump’s stranglehold on the nation will weaken. Just a trace.
I still need to self-medicate to keep from sinking into depression — where ‘self-medicate’, in my case, means studying fun math and physics I don’t need to know. I’ve been learning about the interactions between number theory and group theory. But I haven’t been doing enough physics! I’m better at that, and it’s more visceral: more of a bodily experience, imagining things wiggling around.
So, I’ve been belatedly trying to lessen my terrible ignorance of nuclear physics. Nuclear physics is a fascinating application of quantum theory, but it’s less practical than chemistry and less sexy than particle physics, so I somehow skipped over it.
I’m finding it worth looking at! Right away it’s getting me to think about quantum ellipsoids.