August 2025's Entries (BT) Diversity from (LC) Diversity Jack Morava Random Past Entries TeXnical Issues Sage advice on viewing this blog and posting comments thereon. Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit ...

Today I heard from David Benson that Jack Morava died yesterday. This comes as such a huge shock that I can’t help but hope Benson was somehow misinformed. Morava has been posting comments to the ...

Quick question. Classically the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian is often written 1 2 ( p 2 + q 2), while quantum mechanically it gets some extra ‘ground state energy’ making the Hamiltonian ...

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

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, ...

Next: Part 2 In this post and the next, I want to try out a new idea and see where it leads. It goes back to where magnitude began, which was the desire to unify elementary counting formulas like the ...

In Part 4, I presented a nifty result supporting my claim that classical statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics when Boltzmann’s constant k approaches zero. I used a lot of physics jargon to ...

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 ...

I’m trying to work out how classical statistical mechanics can reduce to thermodynamics in a certain limit. I sketched out the game plan in Part 1 but there are a lot of details to hammer out. While I ...

In this blog post we discuss the main (‘algebraic’) ideas of term rewriting and how they can be applied to term graph and arbitrary graph (i.e. string diagrams) rewriting. Our group was interested in ...

I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An alternative title ...