any generation of Standard Model fermions transforms as the direct sum of six irreducible representations: These correspond to the six types of left-handed fermion: q L, d R, u R, ℓ L, e R, ν R. Six ...

It builds on things I’ve discussed here, but it goes further. Let me explain a bit. A bit is just a binary alternative: 1 or 0, true or false. That’s how it works in classical logic. We could also ...

In the last episode of my column in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, we looked at a particle moving in an attractive central force whose strength is proportional to the inverse cube of ...

Apr 29, 2026 In the last episode of my column in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, we looked at a particle moving in an attractive central force whose strength is proportional to the ...

and he okayed me posting them here. He’s taking the idea of categorifying the Riemann zeta function, explained in my paper, and going further, imagining what it might mean to categorify Riemann’s ...

Despite the “2” in the title, you can follow this post without having read part 1. The whole point is to sneak up on the metricky, analysisy stuff about potential functions from a categorical angle, ...

In this post and the next, I want to try out a new idea and see where it leads. It goes back to where magnitude began, which was the desire to unify elementary counting formulas like the ...

I’ve been blogging a bit about medieval math, physics and astronomy over on Azimuth. I’ve been writing about medieval attempts to improve Aristotle’s theory that velocity is proportional to force, ...

In Part 1, I explained my hopes that classical statistical mechanics reduces to thermodynamics in the limit where Boltzmann’s constant k k approaches zero. In Part 2, I explained exactly what I mean ...

I keep wanting to understand Bernoulli numbers more deeply, and people keep telling me stuff that’s fancy when I want to understand things simply. But let me try again.

When is it appropriate to completely reinvent the wheel? To an outsider, that seems to happen a lot in category theory, and probability theory isn’t spared from this treatment. We’ve had a useful ...

The study of monoidal categories and their applications is an essential part of the research and applications of category theory. However, on occasion the coherence conditions of these categories ...