Topos@4

 

This picture from the  first blog post of the Topos Institute celebrates the official opening of Topos in Jan 2021.  Topos already existed then, but  it seems nice to celebrate from that picture, which is  4 years and 3 months, give or take a few days.

Many things happened in these years and I find it instructive to go over some of what has happened to me and my research. It is also humbling to go over my stand up notes from all these years: the many things I wished I had done, I thought I would do, and also the many things I did and promptly forgot about. Some weeks can be very hard and others look like nothing has happened. (I wanted us to have weekly stand ups at the beginning, but Brendan and David thought that fortnightly was more than enough. In hindsight, I think they were right, our kind of research is slower than some others.)

 Last year I spent almost three months in Germany, at the Hausdorff Institute of Mathematics in our Trimester Program: "Prospects of Formal Mathematics" and the stand ups and notes from it were even more helpful -- 9 hours time difference is hard to deal with.  I do need to write a series of blog posts about the program, what I hope we've achieved and what is still to do, but for the time being I will just post this picture of the "Women in Formal Math" meeting as part of our program.

Recently the Topos stand-ups have been renamed "All Hands" and we had the biggest one ever last week, as Topos Research Oxford is now a reality. Here's a picture, taken by Brendan:

 This milestone (we're three times as big as when we started) and Brendan's interview to Eric Gilliam in freaktakes, made me feel like going over some of my hopes and expectations for Topos. We started in the middle of the pandemic, not exactly an auspicious start. But we're growing and the ideals that inspire us are still mostly the same, which is wonderful.

As our webpage says:

We are a mission-driven non-profit research institute

In a complex and changing world, how can we build a society in which all people and communities can flourish? We believe technology can play a pivotal role, but only if well crafted to be responsive to the values, care, and meaning we each hold.

We research, build, and serve others through new technologies that enable cooperation across difference. We seek to both advance humanity’s capacity for knowledge and fairness, and to help address the pressing, systemic challenges of our time, including risks from emerging technologies, public and global health, and the climate crisis.

Isn't this great?