Posts

Andrei Rodin's letter in Support of Svetlana Mesyats

See Open letter in Support of Svetlana Mesyats where there is an address to send your support of a petition. Svetlana Mesyats is an internationally renowned Classicist specialising in Neoplatonism and the Aristotelian tradition in Late Antiquity. Since 1999 she has held the position of Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. On Tuesday, May 19, 2026, Svetlana was arrested on charges related to the alleged mismanagement of public funds allocated for the preparation of new Russian translations of Aristotle’s works. After spending two days in custody, she was placed under house arrest. The investigation into Svetlana’s case is ongoing and, given the charges, she could face up to 10 years in prison. Svetlana’s arrest occurred in the context of a long-standing struggle for control over the Institute. Svetlana, who has never held a senior administrative position in the Academy or elsewhere, became a victim of this continuing struggle, d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Global Virtual Four Season School in The Foundations of Mathematics and Physics

Image
This is happening everywhere, all year around, just because of the nature of actual Human Knowledge. Invited speakers: a bunch of people who all know what they're talking about . On light and the nature of photographic process: Silver halide crystals only go off when exposed to light at certain frequencies, so the crystals have to be embedded in a glycerine matrix with layers of dye to make the film respond to visible light. Subscribe to  Smarter Every Day 2 . See  Joel Hamkins interviewed on About Logic .
Post a Comment
Read more

Joel Hamkins interviewed on About Logic

Image
It's a real eye opener, this one! I got a bit carried away in the comments  because they asked for questions: Yes, this is great! 18:27 I have a question I would ask him on fictionalism / formalism / realism / structuralism: Aren't these Universes [which] Set Theory holds to be real objective things ultimately all models described in some metalanguage of their own? I'm just thinking of the tiny class of ones I have heard about, such as the Von Neumann cumulative hierarchy with this and that extra cardinals, say. It seems to take quite a lot to define V_\alpha let alone these higher cardinals, and isn't that new metalanguage just another language that one day will have to be formalised, and won't that require a new metalanguage and so on and so forth? So is it really those constructions which are real, or is there another more fundamental concept that is real, one that these are all just instances of? This seems to me to be the idea Lawvere had with the theory of the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Formalising Foundations in Dependent Type Theories

Image
57:54  Lean ⊆ HoTT0. See  Vladimir Voevodsky - What if Current Foundations of Mathematics are Inconsistent .  Subscribe to  Formalization Seminar Cambridge . Subscribe to ItaLean Conference .  Thierry Coquand on Dependent type theory and formalization of mathematics (non-technical) The quality of the sound recording is not great, but it's worth it:  Subscribe to Andrei Rodin .  The state of the art in lean, three years ago: Subscribe to  Lean Prover Community .  I came here because I heard this talk by Simon Willerton last week and he seems to be able to interpret some ideas like extanaturality from higher category theory into 2-category theory, but I am not sure about that: he doesn't say that's what he's done, it's just how it seems to me.  Subscribe to  Topos Institute . 
Post a Comment
Read more

Pupina Plomer on Ni Una Menos and the Pedagogy of Cruelty

Image
See  https://niunamenos.ar/ .  Subscribe to Pupina Plomer .
Post a Comment
Read more

John Baez talking to Jonathan Hickman on the Kakeya Conjecture

Image
At around 34:00 you get a glimpse of why measure theory is such a mess!  See Charles Fefferman's 1971 paper  The multiplier problem for the ball . Jonathan Hickman's 2025 paper:  The Kakeya Conjecture: where does it come from and why is it important?   Subscribe to John Baez .
Post a Comment
Read more

Spiritually Depraved and Misery Inducing Landscapes of North America Episode IV

Image
With a guest host in North Carolina,... See  Spiritually Depraved, Misery Inducing Landscapes of North America Episode III .  Compare this with Brad Lancaster's barrio in Tucson: See Urban Planning Problems and Americans Doing Real Science . Subscribe to Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't . 
Post a Comment
Read more

Glenn Diesen talking with Jeffrey Sachs on his Open Letter to the German Chancellor

Image
See  An Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz . So-called leaders behaving like children.  Richard Wolff a few days ago:  Subscribe to Glenn Diesen . 
Post a Comment
Read more

Requiem for the World Wide Web

Image
My comment : I think the web as it was designed doesn't work anymore, and this is just another issue in a long list of issues. So we need something better, but Google are not going to help with that. So I don't know how it is going to come about. But Google didn't start this thing, they just got a foot in the door because the original design didn't have a way for people to search. You had to ether know the URL for the information you needed or you had to know a directory that would link you to it, but there was no top level to that system, and it was all multilingual and distributed across continents. Google have now joined it all up and they're monetizing it and sitting at the top and trying to make it so nobody can knock them off their perch.  Subscribe to  General Musings .  My comment : The last sentence,... Ouch! Call Justin Trudea! Call Barack Obama, call the RCMP, call a lumberjack,... Hell I don't know what you're supposed to do when stuff like thi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thierry Coquand on Computational Interpretation of Topos Theory

Image
See  Stefan Milius - Demystifying Codensity Monads through Duality  and  Terence Tao Formalising Riemann-Stieltjes Integrals in Lean Mathlib .  Subscribe to  IHES France .  Subscribe to  Weizsäcker-Zentrum Universität Tübingen .  53:29 He describes a type theory as a living object, programmed in some language [and running on computers.]  Subscribe to  Institute for Advanced Study This talk by Steve Awodey was given in December 2010 Subscribe to Institute for Advanced Study .  See the list of the 4th Huawei IHES workshop talks here . This is the one by Olivia Caramello on Grothendieck Toposes in Mathematics:  8:22 See  Morita equivalence in nlab . Also more on finitary models at  35:50  and 45:08 . See also  Wiesław Kubiś - Generic Mathematical Structures .  See the  Toposes in Como 2018 talks here . See also these posts of mine:  Alain Connes on Toposes and Integers  and  Terence T...
Post a Comment
Read more