August 2005 - Categories - categories.org.au

PhD position in Monadic Computational Logics
by Lutz Schroeder 17 Jan '06

17 Jan '06

A 3-year PhD-Position is available in the project "Monadic Computational Logics in HOL" at the University of Bremen. The project is concerned with the implementation and further development of monadic computational logics, including monadic Hoare logic and monadic dynamic logic as well as extensions covering exception handling, as introduced by Till Mossakowski and myself. More detailed information can be found at http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~lschrode/research/projects/HOL-MDL_e.h… Applications or further enquiries may be e-mailed to my address below. -- Lutz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lutz Schroeder Phone +49-421-218-4683 Dept. of Computer Science Fax +49-421-218-3054 University of Bremen lschrode(a)informatik.uni-bremen.de P.O.Box 330440, D-28334 Bremen http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~lschrode -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Job: Lectureship
by Alexander Kurz 05 Oct '05

05 Oct '05

Apologies for multiple postings ------------------------------- Please distribute to potential candidates ----------------------------------------- The University of Leicester seeks to appoint two Lecturers (tenure track) who can contribute to existing research in the foundations and applications of algebraic structures and methods in general, and the emerging area of service-oriented computing in particular ... (see the URL below for more) In particular, we are looking for one person who can complement our strengths in theoretical research which is currently represented by Roy Crole, Alexander Kurz, Vincent Schmitt and Fer-Jan de Vries. The official announcement should be available soon at http://www.le.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/a&r.html Closing date is (probably, see URL above) 5 July 2005. If you have any informal enquires please contact one of us. 15-Jun-2005 19:59:14 -0300,7560;000000000000-00000012

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Preprint: A simple description of Thompson's group F
by Tom Leinster 02 Sep '05

02 Sep '05

The following paper is available: "A simple description of Thompson's group F" Marcelo Fiore, Tom Leinster We show that Thompson's group F is the symmetry group of the "generic idempotent". That is, take the monoidal category freely generated by an object A and an isomorphism A \otimes A --> A; then F is the group of automorphisms of A. http://arxiv.org/abs/math.GR/0508617 Incidentally, this is a result about groups, but the proof uses some higher-dimensional category theory (multicategories, operads, and, less essentially, bicategories). Tom

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Topology and Concurrency Workshop in Aalborg
by Uli Fahrenberg 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

In connection with the defence of two PhD theses ( by Ulrich Fahrenberg and Rafael Wisniewski) in the area, we host a Workshop on Topology and Concurrency. September 27-30 at Department of Mathematical Sciences Aalborg University, Denmark. www.math.aau.dk The speakers are David E. Hurtubise, Penn State, USA, Marcel Bökstedt, Aarhus, Denmark, Glynn Winskel, Cambridge, UK, Kathryn Hess, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, Eric Goubault, CEA Paris, France, Martin Raussen and Lisbeth Fajstrup Aalborg, Denmark For further information, see http://www.math.aau.dk/aktivitet/TopoWork.htm

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New Book about Category Theory and Geometry
by G. Sica 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

Please allow me to bring to the attention of list members the recent publication of Marie La Palme Reyes, Gonzalo E. Reyes, Houman Zolfaghari: GENERIC FIGURES AND THEIR GLUEINGS - A CONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH TO FUNCTOR CATEGORIES http://www.polimetrica.com/categories/01cat.html Price: 30 Euro (Italy); 37 Euro (UE); 40 Euro (Extra-UE). Forwarding and delivery charges are included in the price. Publisher: Polimetrica Internatinal Scientific Publisher. The best way to purchase this book is to buy it directly from the publisher's web-site: http://www.polimetrica.com . I hope you can be interested in this information. If not, please accept my sincere apologies for the trouble: this is not a spam message. Many thanks. All the best, Giandomenico Sica

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Second Announcement-Octoberfest '05
by Phil Scott 20 Aug '05

20 Aug '05

===================================================================== Second Announcement-Octoberfest '05 ======================================== The "not-quite-annual" Octoberfest has been a great tradition among category theorists for several decades now. This weekend conference has always been held at McGill University, but this year is moving down the highway to the University of Ottawa. It will be hosted by the Logic and Foundations of Computing group (LFC). See our website at www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/lfc. The conference will be held on the weekend of October 22nd-23rd. The Octoberfest webpage is: http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~scpsg/Octoberfest05/Octoberfest.final1.htm We will be having a special lecture from Rick Jardine (Western). He will also be giving a special Distinguished CRM lecture to the Ottawa-Carleton Mathematics Institute, at 3:30 Friday afternoon, October 21, and early arriving Octoberfest participants are cordially invited to attend. The Math Department is at 585 King Edward Ave. (See the webpage for campus maps). We have booked 2 blocks rooms at nearby hotels. WE STRONGLY SUGGEST TO BOOK EARLY (Rates are only guaranteed until around mid-September). We have 15 rooms at: Quality Hotel Downtown Ottawa 290 Rideau Street Ottawa, ON K1N 5Y3 (P) 613-789-7511 These rooms are held for Friday and Saturday nights. The group number is 104704 and the group name is "Category Theory Conference". The rate is the University of Ottawa Friends and Family rate of $97.00 plus 15% tax. Guests may phone the hotel directly at 613-789-7511 to reserve and may quote either the group name or number to get the preferred rate. We have also booked some good apartment suites: Cartier Place Suite Hotel, (across the Laurier Bridge, over the Canal), (180 Cooper St, off Elgin Street. 613-236-5000. These are modern apartment suites, with cooking facilities. We have reserved at special govt./university rates for Friday and Saturday nights: 10 single apartments and 5 double-bedroom apartments under the name Category Theory Conference, U. Ottawa. Rates on available apartments are: 4 standard 1 bedroom @ $109/night, 6 superior 1 bedroom @ $112/night, 5 two bedroom @ $149/night, plus 15% tax. Here are some B&B's near U. Ottawa: Home Sweetland Home B&B: 62 Sweetland Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1N 7T6 Phone: (613) 234-1871 Reservations: 1-877-299-3499 (web: http://www.bbexpo.com/sweetland) Benners B&B 541 Besserer 613-789-8320 Olde Bytown Bed & Breakfast, 459 Laurier Ave E Ottawa, Ontario K1N6R4 Gasthaus Switzerland 89 Daly Avenue Ottawa ON K1N6E6 Canada Phone: 613-237-0335 Fax: 613-594-3327 Toll-free: 888-663-0000 (www.gasthausswitzerlandinn.com) Ottawa Centre Bed and Breakfast 62 Stewart Street Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6J1 Phone: 613-237-9494 Tool Free: 866-240-4659 We ask that all attendees send us an email, so that we may have an idea as to the number attending. (Anyone wishing to give a talk should also send us a title and abstract.) We intend to continue the tradition of keeping the registration fees extremely low, especially for students. Sincerely, Rick Blute Phil Scott --

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Paper available
by Walter Tholen 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

The paper "Torsion theories and radicals in normal categories" by M.M. Clementino, D. Dikranjan, and W. Tholen is available (pdf file) at http://www.math.yorku.ca/Who/Faculty/Tholen/research.html Comments welcome! Walter Tholen.

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Ronnie in the news
by Peter Freyd 17 Aug '05

17 Aug '05

[I've appended the piece he's replying to.] Copyright 2005 Newspaper Publishing PLC The Independent (London) August 17, 2005, Wednesday SECTION: First Edition; COMMENT; Pg. 28 LENGTH: 192 words HEADLINE: LETTER: MATHEMATICIANS STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH BYLINE: RONNIE BROWN BODY: Sir: Seeing Boyd Tonkin's article on 'Magic numbers' (15 August) I thought, as a mathematician, I ought to step aside from my 'essentially tragic life', not 'look at my shoes', stop 'struggling with my demons' awhile, and suggest that perhaps a wrong impression is given of mathematics as a development of just a few strange and egocentric minds. Instead it is a world-wide collaborative effort involving tens of thousands, struggling to understand, to see what is true and why it is true, and in so doing to develop a language and notation for description, verification, deduction, and calculation. It describes structures and analogies. It makes difficult things easy. So it is a basis for the modern technical world. Mathematics can also take over for its study what Shakespeare claimed for the role of the poet: 'And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown/ The Poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name.' All this explains its fascination, and the joy of communicating at all levels in the subject. RONNIE BROWN EMERITUS PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR Copyright 2005 Newspaper Publishing PLC The Independent (London) August 15, 2005, Monday SECTION: First Edition; FEATURES; Pg. 42,43 LENGTH: 1325 words HEADLINE: MAGIC NUMBERS; MATHS ISN'T JUST FOR TEXTBOOKS " NOWADAYS IT'S THE INSPIRATION FOR BYLINE: BY BOYD TONKIN HIGHLIGHT: Prime movers: (left to right) Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet in 'Enigma', based on Alan Turing's codebreaking; David Beckham in his No 23 shirt; Russell Crowe as John Nash in 'A Beautiful Mind' BODY: The progress of mathematics abounds in tall tales and unlikely stories. And they don't come much more improbable than this. Outside, the July sun of the Aegean is hammering down on a coastal hotel in Mykonos. Inside, America's most charismatic statistician addresses a gathering that can boast several of the world's top mathematicians as well as a motley assortment of science writers, novelists, historians and theatre people. And what is he doing? He's performing a card trick. Persi Diaconis, now of Stanford and Harvard Universities, once made his living this way. As a teenage prodigy, he toured the US as junior sidekick to one of the most famous magicians of the age. Then, via gamblers' after-hours talk of odds and probability, the sorcerer's apprentice caught the maths bug and took the first steps towards a career in another sort of spotlight. Diaconis was the expert who unmasked the delusions behind the so-called 'Bible Codes' (which supposedly revealed hidden meanings within the text), but today in the Aegean, he's merely baffling his peers. He chucks a deck of cards towards this highly qualified audience. It's caught by Timothy Gowers, a professor at Cambridge and recipient of a Fields Medal "the maths equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Gowers cuts the pack, takes the top card, then passes it to a neighbouring titan, who himself passes it on. After five cuts, Diaconis asks holders of red-suited cards to stand up. Two do. He then proceeds to tell all five punters exactly which card they hold. Cue a burst of awestruck applause. How does he do it? Diaconis quips that 'magicians aren't allowed to explain their secrets and mathematicians can't explain their secrets'. But he tries. The root of card-recognition tricks lies in the De Bruijn Sequences, a branch of what's called 'combinatorics' a discipline with a long history that stretches from the counting patterns used in Indian classical music to the coded instructions for robots used today. The mathematicians grasp the theory easily enough, but the mind-boggling mental speed of the practice still confounds them, and me. This is a taste of the first Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative. Arranged by a group known as Thales and Friends, after the ancient Greek geometer and philosopher who reputedly measured the Pyramids, this unprecedented project to bring scientists and storytellers together was the brainchild of the polymath Apostolos Doxiadis. Worried that the maths he loves has drifted too far out of the cultural mainstream, Doxiadis has already done more than his share of bridge-building. His novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Faber) helps to convey the life-enhancing, and life-consuming, attraction of pure mathematical research. Rebecca Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist who writes in her fiction about the 'essentially tragic' lives of mathematicians, called her pet subjects 'as bad as novelists in terms of ego'. John Allen Paulos, who writes funny and instructive books, such as Innumeracy, about the misuse of statistics in the media, jokes: 'How do you define an extravert mathematician? Someone who looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.' If you want evidence of the problem that confronts them, look no further than today's newspapers. Millions of people now enjoy Sudoku puzzles. Forget the pseudo-Japanese baloney: sudoku grids are a version of the Latin Square created by the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the late 18th century. Yet these legions of amateur problem-solvers tackle puzzles accompanied by the absurd assertion that 'no maths is involved'. In parts of popular culture, mathematics has become not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the love that doesn't even know its name. So, as the sun blazed and the sea sparkled off stage, we heard stories about the extraordinary rhythms of breakthrough and breakdown that punctuate the history of modern maths, and stories about the thinking and imagining that mathematicians do on the cutting edge of creation. John Barrow, another Cambridge professor, related the story of how his play Infinities reached the stage. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford mathematician and Channel 4 pundit, delivered his multimedia gig about the mysteries of prime numbers and the long quest to prove Riemann's Hypothesis. The show took in David Beckham's Real Madrid shirt (a prime 23), some raucous audience participation and Professor du Sautoy himself on a surprisingly sweet trumpet. Less noisily, Tim Gowers ended his plea for concreteness and compression in mathematical explanations with some favourite passages from Alan Hollinghurst, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen -- to highlight the skills that good novelists have and most mathematicians lack. Of course, some writers and producers have turned to the lives and the works of mathematicians for inspiration. A gifted populariser such as Simon Singh can now sell in the hundreds of thousands " as he did with Fermat's Last Theorem. Sylvia Nasar's bestselling biography of the game-theory pioneer John Nash, and his decades-long mental illness, led to the big-screen adaptation of A Beautiful Mind. This familiar, Rain Man model of the pattern-seeking maths prodigy as a recluse, an idiot savant, or downright barking mad, recurs often -- for instance, in fictionalised portraits (such as Enigma) of the computer prophet and Bletchley Park cryptographer Alan Turing. And it even underlies Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, with its Asperger- afflicted teenage narrator, always ready to reel off a series of prime numbers. Not surprisingly, real mathematicians have mixed feelings about mass-market yarns that present their domain as the stamping-ground of eccentrics, or even lunatics. But, for the most part, they applaud the endeavour to dramatise the human struggle of mathematical reasoning. Only one (absent) literary figure really fell foul of the Mykonos mob: the American writer David Foster Wallace, who in Everything and More wrote not a novel but a purported history of the mathematics of infinity. The computer-science guru Martin Davis counted '86 really egregious errors' in Wallace's book. 'Are we so hard up for approval from the humanities that we have to accept this?' he thundered. And yet the history of modern maths features such a wealth of near-incredible narratives that certain kinds of faction or docu-drama will exert a huge appeal. After all, this is a field that, early in the last century, plunged into a 'foundational crisis' that left its finest minds believing that they stood not on solid rock but on shifting sand. Out of that collective breakdown grew ideas about general computing machines that began as the purest theory but ended up as the intellectual inspiration of almost everything we now do with technology. If mathematics counts as the art of reality, then you might argue that its artistic crisis gave birth to the modern world. This is the theme of the mathematical narrative that Doxiadis and some colleagues will tell next. Collaborating with the Berkeley-based computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou and the Athenian artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna, Doxiadis has been working on a ground-breaking graphic novel about the development of 20th-century maths and its makers, from Russell and Hilbert to Godel and Turing. Due in 2007, Logicomix will tell an epic human, and political, story. On the one hand, Papadatos, the project's chief graphic artist, depicts the social turmoil, global warfare and deadly ideologies of the last century. On the other, the core story of maths " as with every other brand of creativity " will often come down to the journey of a single mind alone with its dreams, and its demons. 'Like a mathematician,' Papadatos notes, 'a cartoonist works with paper, pens " and a waste-paper basket.' www.thalesandfriends.org

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Research positions in Mobility and Security at Edinburgh
by Ian.Stark＠ed.ac.uk 16 Aug '05

16 Aug '05

FOUR research positions available Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Mobility & Security group http://www.lfcs.ed.ac.uk/m+s Closing date: 30 September 2005 Following on from the successful "Mobile Resource Guarantees" project, the Mobility & Security group at Edinburgh has four research positions available, lasting from one to three years, in two new projects working with proof-carrying code in Java. - Mobius: a European collaboration developing technologies to support trust and security in the next generation of global computers. - ReQueST: an EPSRC-funded project to equip e-Science applications with formal proofs of their requirements for memory space and processor time. Both projects will involve working with Java, the Java Modeling Language JML, logics for Java bytecode, and automated theorem proving tools. Activities will range from theoretical research to prototype implementation, with considerable scope for international collaboration. We seek applicants with a strong background in computer science, in particular the following areas: program logics and proof systems; formal methods; type systems and static analysis; semantics of programming languages; compilation techniques; mobile code; embedded systems. Candidates should have either a PhD or equivalent research experience. Please note that these are fixed-term positions, associated with specific funded grants. Further details: http://www.lfcs.ed.ac.uk/m+s/posts Vacancy reference: 3004893 at http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk Please apply online, using the links above; the closing date for applications is 30 September 2005. These positions are available immediately and we encourage applicants to apply early. For informal enquiries, contact Ian Stark at the address below. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Ian Stark Office: JCMB 2506 School of Informatics Tel: 0131 650 5143 The University of Edinburgh Fax: 0131 667 7209 James Clerk Maxwell Building King's Buildings, Mayfield Road Email: Ian.Stark(a)ed.ac.uk Edinburgh EH9 3JZ Scotland http://www.ed.ac.uk/~stark --------------------------------------------------------------------

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position available
by tholen＠mathstat.yorku.ca 16 Aug '05

16 Aug '05

YORK UNIVERSITY Faculty of Arts MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS Applications are invited for an NSERC University Faculty Award, at the Assistant Professor level in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics to commence July 1, 2006. Applications in the areas of Foundations of Computation (category theory, logic, or complexity), Mathematical Analysis, and Statistics will be considered. The successful candidate must have a PhD, a proven record of independent research excellence, and evidence of potential for superior teaching. Preference will be given to candidates who can strengthen existing areas of present and ongoing research activity. All positions at York are subject to budgetary approval. Applications must be received by September 19, 2005. Applicants should send resumes and arrange for three letters of recommendation (one of which should address teaching) to be sent directly to: UFA Search Committee Department of Mathematics and Statistics York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario Canada M3J 1P3 Fax: 416-736-5757 Email: ufa.recruit(a)mathstat.yorku.ca www.math.yorku.ca/Hiring The UFA program is directed to women and aboriginal peoples (see www.nserc.ca for a full description). York University is an Affirmative Action Employer. The Affirmative Action Program can be found on York's website at www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be obtained by calling the affirmative action office at 416-736-5713. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents will be given priority.

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