Merlin's Notebook

It’s interesting to ask mathematicians about why they do mathematics. Some tell me that it’s a pursuit of truth. Others seek understanding. Occasionally there’s an admission of the pursuit of glory. My personal claim is that I’ve always wished to have a voice and to contribute to The Great Conversation, the sharing of thoughts, insights… Read more

This is a quick post for all of my non-Brasilian colleagues who are interested in learning about the research community here. My student Paulo Vitor Macedo Dias has put together a Brasilian Category Theory website. This is meant to be a repository for all things category theory in Brasil: we want to compile lists of… Read more

Our paper “Towards a Unified Theory of Time-Varying Data” was accepted in the Springer journal “Applied Categorical Structures” — yay! As you might expect, the paper is all about data that — you guessed it — varies with time. I’ve been thinking about time-varying graphs, where the vertices and edges may come and go as… Read more

I guess it’s official: as of today I am a professor at the Institute for Mathematics and Statistics at the Univesity of São Paulo (USP)! This is what I would’ve written last semester, when I started my new job. But as many can imagine, moving to another continent can be a little distracting. Now I’m… Read more

Emilio Minichiello recently gave a woderful talk at the at the New York City Category Theory Seminar all about some results of mine (joint with Ernst Althaus, Daniel Rosiak and James Fairbanks) concerning dynamic programming and sheaves. Since many students and colleagues have asked me for recordings of my lectures on this subject and since… Read more

My good friend Zoltan Kocsis and I finally got our paper “Degree of Satisfiability in Heyting Algebras” published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Yay! Since Zoltan is half-way across the world, we can’t grab a beer together and celebrate, so instead here’s a celebratory blog post (you can find the ArXiv version of our… Read more