Babylonian mathematics
So, you remember that Babylonian mathematical text I mentioned in my last post? I remembered subsequently that I had already posted it on my moblog, and you can view it here. Cool, eh?
Canada continues foggy. Today we went for an Excursion to a nature reserve. There were many plants that I'm told were cool, and also seals. Lots of seals. When I looked through the telescope, vast sections of what I'd taken to be island turned out to be covered in seal. Yay for seals!
The conference is going a bit better: we had a very good talk this morning by Steve Lack about a nice 2-category of bicategories (rather than a 3-category or tricategory, as you'd expect). And then some other things that I didn't follow too well, partly because they were over my head and partly because I was stitching up a big hole in my Converse at the time. We also had a really good talk by Michael Johnson yesterday, about an application of category theory to databases: basically, you take the entity-relation diagram of your DB, consider it as a commutative diagram, and apply standard category-theoretic reasoning. This often (apparently) leads to more robust DB schemas, and I think it could be applied to query optimisation as well. There are some links here.
Canada continues foggy. Today we went for an Excursion to a nature reserve. There were many plants that I'm told were cool, and also seals. Lots of seals. When I looked through the telescope, vast sections of what I'd taken to be island turned out to be covered in seal. Yay for seals!
The conference is going a bit better: we had a very good talk this morning by Steve Lack about a nice 2-category of bicategories (rather than a 3-category or tricategory, as you'd expect). And then some other things that I didn't follow too well, partly because they were over my head and partly because I was stitching up a big hole in my Converse at the time. We also had a really good talk by Michael Johnson yesterday, about an application of category theory to databases: basically, you take the entity-relation diagram of your DB, consider it as a commutative diagram, and apply standard category-theoretic reasoning. This often (apparently) leads to more robust DB schemas, and I think it could be applied to query optimisation as well. There are some links here.