Niles Johnson

nilesjohnson@mathstodon.xyz

<p>Working in topology and category theory<br />Professor, Ohio State at Newark</p>

Posts

Post #2747062
I still have my reservations about zref-clever [1], but so far the things that I thought were bugs have been resolved by me learning more how to use it. I find the documentation very hard to read, in the particular way of something written by an expert that is trying but still overestimating the reader&#39;s background. (Insert xkcd experts overestimate average familiarity [2].) But, documentation that I can *eventually* use to solve my problem is so SOOOO much better than nothing. [1]:...
Post #2516095
The people handling typesetting for my most recent article are from a company called Straive; here is their website: https://straive.com/ If you&#39;re thinking, wow, this looks like a group that definitely knows about and cares about mathematical typesetting... I&#39;m sorry to tell you, that&#39;s not the case. I&#39;ve had some frustrations with typesetting services in the past, but this is a new level of content-free interaction. Never have I been more certain that my &am...
Post #1527483
Sometimes someone well-known and highly-respected says something so flatly stupid that it boggles the mind. I actually can&#39;t concentrate because I&#39;m so... bewildered. I would say let&#39;s take a lunch break, but *I&#39;ve already done that*. I do it almost every day, and have been doing so for my entire career.
Post #1421413
Nick Gurski and I have a new paper out, about another coherence problem! Invertibility and parity in symmetric monoidal categories https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15142 For someone who doesn&#39;t enjoy coherence theorems, I seem to spend a lot of time on them. This one is about coherence for *invertible* objects in a symmetric monoidal category, using an invariant that we call *parity*. In the thread below, I&#39;ll explain - what our main results say, in a few different ways, - what tec...
Post #1186305
This idea of big v.s. small for thinking about math is a useful one that I haven&#39;t come across before. As could be expected for an article about visualization, the pictures are good too (both visually and conceptually). https://chessapig.github.io/talks/Big-Small @robinhouston https://mathstodon.xyz/@robinhouston/116390773204122582