As a bit of a fun project, I would like to put together a collection of slogans, and am asking for contributions. Such a collection may or may not turn out to be "useful", but at least it will be amusing. I'm thinking of a slogan (apart from being a Scottish Highland war-cry) as a pithy little phrase or saying or motto or truism ..., just short of being poetry, that can tweak the neural pathways to follow a previously traveled path of understanding. Slogans tend to be little gems, often found in the folklore, but sometimes published, such as the 5 slogans in Jim Lambek & P. Scott's "Intro to higher order categorical logic" - these are: I: many objects of interest in mathematics congregate in concrete categories. II: many objects of interest to mathematicians are themselves small categories. III: many objects of interest to mathematicians may be viewed as functors from small categories to Sets. IV: many important concepts in mathematics arise as adjoints, right or left, to previously known functors. V: many equivalence and duality theorems in mathematics arise as an equivalence of fixed subcategories induced by a pair of adjoint functors. I think there are many more such gems; I like (and use) the one that says: the arrows always go through the limit. - I attribute this one to Armin Frei circa 1971 at UBC. Another really good one is: adjoints are the unity and identity of opposites. - I attribute this one to Bill Lawvwere Here are a couple more, from the physics of information: * there is no information without representation. * there is no processing without a process. - attributed to Benjamin Schumacher of Kenyon College. Each slogan can explode into rich and meaningful ideas, sort of the "url's of the mind" (if you like that kind of cyber-geek talk). Anyway, I hope the intention is clear, and that everyone will contribute their favourites as well. Please either post a response or send to me directly (no flames please), along with appropriate credit if known; I will assemble, and depending on how it goes, make the collection available. Could be fun and interesting - I look forward to your responses. Best regards to all .... Al /\ / Al R. Vilcius, Canada / \ / mailto:al.r@vilcius.com /--->\ / Tel./FAX (905) 854-3342 /3371 / \/ web site: http://www.VILCIUS.com
... about adding slogans: "there is no mathematics without structures" and "there are no structures without transformations (between structures)" In stating this, I would go back to (Gauss and) Reimann (and Klein). This was a turning point of last century mathematics. Geometry is the analysis of (possibly) curved space and the unity of geometries is found on the notion of transformation (over manifolds, say: continuous, differentiable ...). Mathematics is no more found (only) on "quantities", since ratios of length and of angles, at the heart of Euclidean geometry, are not preserved in non-euclidean frames (their group of automorphisms are not closed under omotheties). Category Theory is the theory which inherited this fantastic broadening of perspective. --Giuseppe Longo Lab. "Jacques Herbrand" CNRS et Ecole Normale Superieure (Postal addr.: LIENS 45, Rue D'Ulm 75005 Paris (France) ) http://www.dmi.ens.fr/users/longo e-mail: longo@di.ens.fr (tel. ++33-1-4432-3328, FAX 4432-2080) Upon kind permission of the M.I.T. Press, the book below is currently downloadable from Longo's web page above (its n-th edition is out of print...): Andrea Asperti and Giuseppe Longo. Categories, Types and Structures: an introduction to Category Theory for the working computer scientist. M.I.T.- Press, 1991. (pp. 1--300).
How do you like: Higher dimensional algebra supplies algebraic inverses to subdivision, for application to local-to-global problems. (That has been the intention of our programme since the mid-1960's.) Ronnie Brown On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Al Vilcius wrote:
As a bit of a fun project, I would like to put together a collection of slogans, and am asking for contributions. Such a collection may or may not turn out to be "useful", but at least it will be amusing.
New popularisation project http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ma/CPM/rpamath/overall.htm Help sought! School of Informatics, Mathematics Division, University of Wales, Bangor Dean St., Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 1UT, United Kingdom Tel. direct:+44 1248 382474|office: 382475 fax: +44 1248 361429 World Wide Web: home page: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/~mas010/ (Links to survey articles: Higher dimensional group theory Groupoids and crossed objects in algebraic topology) Symbolic Sculpture and Mathematics: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/SculMath/ Mathematics and Knots: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ma/CPM/exhibit/welcome.htm
participants (3)
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Al Vilcius -
Giuseppe Longo -
Ronnie Brown