These are the show notes for episode 34 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 34 is the magic constant of a 4 by 4 normal magic square. More about 34 from Number Gossip. There is a good page on magic squares from markfarrar.co.uk.
This week on the podcast I speak to Dr. Eugenia Cheng from the University of Sheffield who talks about category theory. You can find out more about Eugenia’s work at her website. If you are interested to find out more about category theory, an excellent place to start is to watch Eugenia on TheCatsters YouTube channel. There are an interesting set of slides, “Category Theory for Beginners” by Dr Steve Easterbrook of the University of Toronto and a set of notes “An ABC of Category Theory” by Tom Leinster of the University of Glasgow.
You can find out more about my work with the IMA by following me on Twitter, reading this blog and visiting http://www.ima.org.uk/student/. Join the Facebook page.
Thanks for the podcast and the links. Dr Cheng’s enthusiasm is inspiring. Another great place to look for enthusiastic take on category theory and higher dimensional categories is John Baez’s This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html. Also, one of the more valuable resources for students of category theory is the “reprints” page maintained by the online journal Theory and Applications of Categories:
http://www.tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/. This page has downloadable versions of some of the classic texts and papers of Category Theory, which, as Dr. Cheng mentioned, is a surprisingly young branch of mathematics.
Dan,
Thank you for this contribution and interesting links.
P.