23 February 2008

links for 2008-02-23

From A neighborhood of infinity: What is topology?, attempting to provide some intuition for the standard axioms that define a topology in terms of "observable sets" (which are just open sets, with different intuition attached to them!)

Also, on a totally unrelated note: John Baez has online notes from the course he gave in Fall '03, Winter '04, Spring '04. The winter notes are particularly interesting to me, because they combine combinatorics (which I know well) and a lot of category-theoretic notions that I'm not too familiar with.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That year's seminar really is great. And not only does it get some great combinatorics, it uses them to talk about quantum mechanics!

Anonymous said...

I almost thought Joan Baez was giving math lectures!

Michael Lugo said...

I believe John Baez (the mathematical physicist) and Joan Baez (the singer) are cousins.

Anonymous said...

Indeed they are. I still need to get him to sign a copy of Diamonds & Rust, and her to sign a copy of Gauge Fields, Knots & Gravity