Author Archives: Brent

Maniac week postmortem

Posted on August 19, 2014

My maniac week was a great success! First things first: here’s a time-lapse video1 (I recommend watching it at the full size, 1280×720). Some statistics2: Total hours of productive work: 55.5 (74 pings) Average hours of work per day3: 11 … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

Readers wanted!

Posted on August 10, 2014

tl;dr: Read a draft of my thesis and send me your feedback by September 9! Over the past year I’ve had several people say things along the lines of, “let me know if you want me to read through your … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, combinatorics, diagrams, grad school, math, species, writing | Tagged , , , , | 15 Comments

Maniac week

Posted on August 4, 2014

Inspired by Bethany Soule (and indirectly by Nick Winter, and also by the fact that my dissertation defense and the start of the semester are looming), I am planning a “maniac week” while Joyia and Noah will be at the … Continue reading →

Posted in grad school, meta, writing | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Anafunctors

Posted on June 16, 2014

This is part four in a series of posts on avoiding the axiom of choice (part one, part two, part three). In my previous post, we considered the “Axiom of Protoequivalence”—that is, the statement that every fully faithful, essentially surjective … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

AC and equivalence of categories

Posted on June 5, 2014

This is part three in a series of posts on avoiding the axiom of choice (part one, part two). In my previous post, I explained one place where the axiom of choice often shows up in category theory, namely, when … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Unique isomorphism and generalized “the”

Posted on May 13, 2014

This is part two in a series of posts on avoiding the axiom of choice; you can read part one here. In category theory, one is typically interested in specifying objects only up to unique isomorphism. In fact, definitions which … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, math, species | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Avoiding the axiom of choice, part I

Posted on May 8, 2014

I’m hard at work on my dissertation, and plan to get back to doing a bit of blogging based on stuff I’m writing and thinking about, as a way of forcing myself to explain things clearly and to potentially get … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, math, species | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments