Start a new discussion

Not signed in

Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below

Site Tag Cloud

Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

• I addede a paragraph at Poincaré duality about the generalizations, and created the entry (so far only descent bibliography) Grothendieck duality; the list of examples expanded at duality. All prompted by seeing the today’s arXiv article of Drinfel’d and Boyarchenko.

• started a contents-page symplectic geometry - contents and added it as a floating toc to relevant entries (there should be more, have not included everything yet)

• started entries

collecting some evident ideas and observations, most of which we have discussed at one point or other over at the $n$Café.

• prompted by the discussion in another thread I have started creating stubs

But not much real content there so far.

• I added some discussion at terminal coalgebra that the category of trees (equivalently, the category of forests $Set^{\omega^{op}}$) is a terminal coalgebra for the small-coproduct cocompletion (as endofunctor on $Cat$); this is a special case of Adamek’s theorem. I linked to this discussion by adding a section at tree. (There is of course closely related discussion at pure set as well.)

It seems to me that the nLab is a bit thin on general matters of recursion. I’ve been looking a bit at the discussion in Paul Taylor’s book, and I am becoming partial to the general idea that in some sense coalgebras and corecursion often come first; after that one may base recursive schemata on the notion of well-founded coalgebras. For example, (ill-founded) trees are really simple conceptually, or at least have a very simple uniform description: as presheaves $\omega^{op} \to Set$. This is just a simple-minded application of Adamek’s theorem. Later, one can peek inside and gets the initial algebra for the small-coproduct completion as the category of well-founded trees, but this is by no means as simple (one can’t just apply Adamek’s theorem for constructing initial algebras – the hypotheses don’t hold here!).

• wrote something at vacuum.

I mainly wanted the link to point somewhere. I don’t claim that what I have there presently is a good discussion. So I have labeled it “under construction” for the moment.

• since it was mentioned on the category theory mailing list I went to the entry measure coalgebra and edited a bit: I have added some hyperlinks and Definition- and Proposition-environments.

Somebody who created the entry should look into this issue: currently the entry mentions a ground field right at the beginning, which however never reappears again. It’s clear that everything can be done over an arbitrary ground field, I guess, but currently this is not discussed well.

In order to satisfy links I then created

• added to dilaton the action functional of dilaton gravity (Perelman’s functional)

Also references and maybe something else, I forget.

• I shouldn’t be doing this. But in a clear case of procrastination of more urgent tasks, I created a floatic TOC string theory - contents and added it to some relevant entries.

• I notice that in recent preprints (see equation (2.1) in today’s 1108.4060) people are getting awefully close to rediscovering nonabelian 2-connections in the worldvolume theory of NS-fivebranes (but they are forgetting the associator! :-).

This follows a famous old conjecture by Witten, which says that the worldvolume theory of a bunch of fivebranes on top of each other (what physicsist call a “stack” of fivebranes) should be a nonabelian principal 2-bundle/gerbe-gauge theory. If you have followed Witten’s developments since then (with his latest on Khovanov homology) you’ll know that he is suggesting that this theory is at the very heart of a huge cluster of concepts (geometric Langlands duality and S-duality being part of it).

So I should eventually expand the entry fivebrane . I’ll start with some rudiments now, but will have to interrupt soon. Hopefully more later.

• I could not find a better title, for the new entry, unfortunately: opinions on development of mathematics (should be mainly bibiliography entry). I need some place to start collecting the titles which talk about generalities of mathematical development, what is important, what is not. This is relevant for but it is not philosophy. Not only because of traditional focus of philosophy on “bigger” things like true nature of beings, meaning, ethics, cognition and so on, but more because the latter is very opinionated in the usual sense, even politics. Though we should of course, choose those which have important content, it is useful to collect those. We can have netries like math and society, even math funding for other external things of relevance, eventually. This was quick fix as I have no time now.

• I added a little bit of material to ordered field, namely that a field is orderable iff it is a real field (i.e., $-1$ is not a sum of squares). More importantly, at real closed field, I have addressed an old query of Colin Tan:

Colin: Is it true that real closure is an adjoint construction to the forgetful functor from real closed fields to orderable fields?

by writing out a proof (under Properties) that indeed the forgetful functor from category of real closed fields and field homomorphisms to the category of real fields and field homomorphisms has a left adjoint (the real closure). Therefore I am removing this query from that page over to here.

• I have created a stub for constructible universe. I did not go through the version of the definition via definability. Now constructible sets are sets in the constructible universe. The notion of course, intentionally reminds the constructible sets in topology and algebaric geometry as exposed e.g. in the books on stratified spaces, on perverse sheaves (MacPherson e.g.) and in Lurie’s Higher Topos Theory. Now I wanted to create constructible set but I was hoping that there is a common definition for all these cases or at least logically defendable unique point of view, rather than partial similarity of definitions. I mean one always have some business of unions, complements etc. starting with some primitive family, say with open sets, or algebraic sets, or open sets relative strata etc. and inductively constructs more. Now, all the operations mentioned seem to have sense in some class of lattices. Maybe in Heyting lattices or at least in Boolean lattices. On the other hand, google spits out several references on constructible lattices *one of the authors is certain Janowitz), but the definition there is disappointing. I mean I would like that one has some sort of constructible completion of certain kind of a lattice and talk about the constructible elements as the elements of constructible completion. I am sure that the nLab community could nail the wanted common generalization down or to give a reference if the literature has it already.

• I have started an entry on proper homotopy theory. This is partially since it will be needed in discussing some parts of strong shape theory, but it may also be useful for discussing duality and various other topics, including studying non-compact spaces in physical contexts. This is especially true for non-compact manifolds. (I do not know what fibre bundles etc. look like in the proper homotopy setting!)