Angry that...

Angry that this paper The Dialectica Categories has been available from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~vdp/publications/dial87.pdf  for some 20 years and people insist on not reading it, even when they want to  discuss dialectica categories.

Why??!?? ...

is it because the book is AMS? because it's not in latex?

I know the writing is not sparkling, but come on people... if you want to talk about this stuff, you've got to read it!

Disagreement is fair; criticism is hard to deal with, but unavoidable. But ignoring it completely, this is simply NOT ON.

Workshops I am organizing this year

Workshop on Natural Language in Computer Science, Vienna Month of Logic, Austria, July 2014.

Workshop on Logics and Ontologies for Natural Language (LogOnto) 2014, associated to FOI2014, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil LogOnto 2014 - Workshop on Logics and Ontologies for Natural Language (LogOnto) - September 22, 2014

at least I'm getting my work to converge, I think..

Me in YouTube?! oh my...

Larry Moss told me that my  'Introduction to Category Theory'  lectures (or Category Theory for Linguists)  are now on YouTube, uploaded by NASSLLI2012.
They're precisely at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH0haHFiWLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEO-Qc4a6Qc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X7kV-UoRTU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsaXHsbn4_o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfZOiDr0Mxc
I wish I had managed to do a better job of those....

Is Category Theory Constructive?

When it rains in Rio, it rains...

Pretty picture of lightening in Rio, from the much abused Niteroi...

Unrelated to the rain, recently I have been sending friends the following article of Colin McLarty

Two Constructivist Aspects of CategoryTheory

after an original suggestion of Wes Phoa. Very interesting and very relevant, as I need to write a historical account of  Categorical Logic and don't know where to start.
Later...

(Belated) Happy New Year!

We had a great time in Berlin, where the fireworks were spectacular. Very different from the ones in Rio in the beautiful picture, from Guido in Facebook.

In Rio they're big business organized by the City or the big hotels, who knows... while in Berlin, we saw families and groups of retirees putting out an incredible show that lasted more than 45 min with extremely impressive effects. But anyway the reason for the post is to add somewhere our new papers on OpenWordNet-PT for the Global WordNet Conference. One is progress report  and the other, the work with Livy Real on the integration of the nominalizations/deverbals into the OpenWN-PT.

Variable Set Theory?

Mike Barr posted in the cats mailing list the following:
Around 1986, Colin McLarty, Charles Wells, and I noticed that Scientific American had recently published a few articles on subjects mathematical
and decided to try to write one on variable set theory, AKA topos theory.
Unfortunately, that particular window at Sci Am quickly closed.  Our article was turned down and we forgot about it.  More recently, I decided it might be interesting, or at least amusing to throw it open to the
categorical community.  The result can be found at
ftp://ftp.math.mcgill.ca/barr/pdffiles/vst.pdf

(the picture is apparently Grothendieck lifting Michael Atiyah, from facebook, so who knows if it's real...)


Further news: Since the ftp site in Montreal is having some issues at the moment, Mike Barr was kind enough to send us a copy of the paper, which I'm posting here. Thanks Mike!

Set Theory for the Masses

So I've posted something about the two currents in Set Theory trying to add more axioms to solve the Continuum Hypothesis and the guys had more than a hundred comments on the post, so they are even starting to write a new paper on the subject, yay!

In some ways this is all I have always advocated for: maths needs to be done collectively, social networks can have an effective role in creating new knowledge by putting people in contact with others, etc..

But the Facebook post is not ideal: you cannot write maths properly, you cannot comment where you want, and let's face it, I cannot cope with the speed that they're producing ideas/thesis/hypotheses and demolitions. Maybe this is because I'm not a set-theorist, maybe it's because my full time job is not as a mathematician, maybe is just because I'm getting old. Who knows?
Anyways in an attempt to parse their conversation and get my own ideas straightened I've created another blog http://settheory4themasses.blogspot.com/2013/12/all-you-didnt-want-to-know-about-set.html