{"id":7,"date":"2006-06-06T11:52:15","date_gmt":"2006-06-06T11:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2006\/06\/06\/next-topic-poll-results-or-the-losers-win\/"},"modified":"2006-06-06T11:52:15","modified_gmt":"2006-06-06T11:52:15","slug":"next-topic-poll-results-or-the-losers-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/06\/next-topic-poll-results-or-the-losers-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Next Topic Poll Results; or, the losers win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I mentioned here, back on the old home of goodmath, I was taking a poll of what good math topic to cover next.  In that poll, graph theory and topology were far away the most popular topics, tying for most votes (8 each), compared to no more than 2 votes for any other subject.<br \/>\nSo, the next  topic I&#8217;m going to talk about is: category theory.<br \/>\nThere is actually a reason for that. I&#8217;m not just ignoring what people voted for. Based on the poll, I was planning on writing about topology, so  I started doing some background reading on toplogy.  What came up in the first chapter of the book I picked up? Explanations of how to interpret category-theory diagrams, because the author of the text found cat theory to be useful for explaining some of the concepts of topology.<br \/>\nI also looked up some articles on graph theory &#8211; in particular, graph isomorphisms, because that&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve done some work on. And what do I find when I start to read them? Again, category theory diagrams.<br \/>\nAnd what do I find when I look at wikipedia, to see if I missed anything in my recent series of posts on the semantics of lambda calculus? Category theory.<br \/>\nCategory theory is a wierd subject, which has an amazing way of generating incredibly polarizing attitudes among mathematicians. But it&#8217;s cropping up more and more in numerous fields of mathematics, and it&#8217;s widely used in computer science. There seem to be significant doubts among many people as to whether or not category theory represents anything dramatically new, whether or not it provides new insights that couldn&#8217;t have been gained by any other fields of mathematics. But whether or not it&#8217;s a source of new knowledge, it seems to be undeniable that it is extremely useful as a tool for understanding and explaining other mathematical fields.<br \/>\nSo I <em>will<\/em> definitely write about topology and graph theory soon. But first, it&#8217;s going to be category theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I mentioned here, back on the old home of goodmath, I was taking a poll of what good math topic to cover next. In that poll, graph theory and topology were far away the most popular topics, tying for most votes (8 each), compared to no more than 2 votes for any other subject. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76,39],"tags":[308],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category-theory","category-meta","tag-meta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}