Eighty years ago to the day, the far right was in its ascendancy, and still rising. Hitler was in complete control of Germany, Mussolini had been in charge of a police state in Italy for a decade. But a little to the southwest, in Spain, war had already broken out.
Mathematics, mathematicians, philosophy
In December 2016 I gave a talk to secondary school students about mathematics and mathematical philosophy.
AustMS talk, December 2016
On 6 December, 2016, I gave a talk at the Austrlaian Mathematical Society Annual Meeting at ANU, Canberra. The talk was entitled “Strand algebras and contact categories”. Slides from the talk are available.
What to do while Rome burns
From Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916).
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump
On the Eighteenth Brumaire (9 November) 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France. Louis Napoleon did the same in 1851. First as tragedy, then as farce. Tragedy and farce and much more — with vastly greater consequences — have taken place on the Eighteenth Brumaire 2016.
Talks at Low-dimensional topology workshop, Oct-Nov 2016
In October-November 2016 I gave two talks at the MSI Workshop on Low-Dimensional Topology & Quantum Algebra at ANU, Canberra. Some slides are available.
On the end of the world
One can take several possible attitudes to the bleakest of certainties about the future.
The story of a paradox
My story of Bertrand Russell, given at The Laborastory, a monthly science storytelling event in Melbourne.
Throughput the Wringer
For those who care about the long term prospects of civilization, the only way out is a radically different system.
Strand algebras and contact categories
We demonstrate an isomorphism between the homology of the strand algebra of bordered Floer homology, and the category algebra of the contact category introduced by Honda. This isomorphism provides a direct correspondence between various notions of Floer homology and arc diagrams, on the one hand, and contact geometry and topology on the other. In particular, arc diagrams correspond to quadrangulated surfaces, idempotents correspond to certain basic dividing sets, strand diagrams correspond to contact structures, and multiplication of strand diagrams corresponds to stacking of contact structures. The contact structures considered are cubulated, and the cubes are shown to behave equivalently to local fragments of strand diagrams.