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N-category Number
In mathematics, the category number of a mathematician is a humorous construct invented by Dan Freed, intended to measure the capacity of that mathematician to stomach the use of higher categories. It is defined as the largest number ''n'' such that they can think about ''n''-categories for a half hour without getting a splitting headache. See also * n-category * Erdős number * 2-category In category theory, a strict 2-category is a category with "morphisms between morphisms", that is, where each hom-set itself carries the structure of a category. It can be formally defined as a category enriched over Cat (the category of catego ... * Weak n-category References Higher category theory {{categorytheory-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline. Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicsentities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A ''proof'' consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, andin case of abstraction from naturesome basic properties that are considered true starting points of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dan Freed
Daniel Stuart Freed (born 17 April 1959) is an American mathematician, specializing in global analysis and its applications to supersymmetry, string theory, and quantum field theory. Since 1989, he has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Freed studied at Harvard University, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1981. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985 with thesis ''The geometry of loop groups'' under Isadore Singer. As a postdoc, Freed was a C. L. E. Moore instructor, Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Beginning in 1989, he was an associate professor, and from 1994, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1996 to 1998, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and he was a visiting scientist at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (1995, 1999). In the academic year 2002/2003, Free ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Higher Category Theory
In mathematics, higher category theory is the part of category theory at a ''higher order'', which means that some equalities are replaced by explicit arrows in order to be able to explicitly study the structure behind those equalities. Higher category theory is often applied in algebraic topology (especially in homotopy theory), where one studies algebraic invariants of spaces, such as their fundamental weak ∞-groupoid. Strict higher categories An ordinary category has objects and morphisms, which are called 1-morphisms in the context of higher category theory. A 2-category generalizes this by also including 2-morphisms between the 1-morphisms. Continuing this up to ''n''-morphisms between (''n'' − 1)-morphisms gives an ''n''-category. Just as the category known as Cat, which is the category of small categories and functors is actually a 2-category with natural transformations as its 2-morphisms, the category ''n''-Cat of (small) ''n''-categories is actually a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erdős Number
The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual has collaborated with a large and broad number of peers. Overview Paul Erdős (1913–1996) was an influential Hungarian mathematician who in the latter part of his life spent a great deal of time writing papers with a large number of colleagues, working on solutions to outstanding mathematical problems. He published more papers during his lifetime (at least 1,525) than any other mathematician in history. (Leonhard Euler published more total pages of mathematics but fewer separate papers: about 800.) Erdős spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase, visiting over 500 collaborators around the world. The idea of the Erdős number was originally created by the mathematician's friends as a tribute to his enormous ou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2-category
In category theory, a strict 2-category is a category with "morphisms between morphisms", that is, where each hom-set itself carries the structure of a category. It can be formally defined as a category enriched over Cat (the category of categories and functors, with the monoidal structure given by product of categories). The concept of 2-category was first introduced by Charles Ehresmann in his work on enriched categories in 1965. The more general concept of bicategory (or ''weak'' 2-''category''), where composition of morphisms is associative only up to a 2-isomorphism, was introduced in 1968 by Jean Bénabou.Jean Bénabou, Introduction to bicategories, in Reports of the Midwest Category Seminar, Springer, Berlin, 1967, pp. 1--77. Definition A 2-category C consists of: * A class of 0-''cells'' (or ''objects'') , , .... * For all objects and , a category \mathbf(A,B). The objects f,g: A \to B of this category are called 1-''cells'' and its morphisms \alpha: f \Ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Weak N-category
In category theory, a weak ''n''-category is a generalization of the notion of strict ''n''-category where composition and identities are not strictly associative and unital, but only associative and unital up to coherent equivalence. This generalisation only becomes noticeable at dimensions two and above where weak 2-, 3- and 4-categories are typically referred to as bicategories, tricategories, and tetracategories. The subject of weak ''n''-categories is an area of ongoing research. History There is currently much work to determine what the coherence laws for weak ''n''-categories should be. Weak ''n''-categories have become the main object of study in higher category theory. There are basically two classes of theories: those in which the higher cells and higher compositions are realized algebraically (most remarkably Michael Batanin's theory of weak higher categories) and those in which more topological models are used (e.g. a higher category as a simplicial set satisfy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
