Talks

John Baez

These are transparencies and/or videos for some talks. They're in reverse chronological order. You can see a lot of talk videos on my YouTube channel.

For a complete list of the talks I've given or am scheduled to give, click here.

• Category Theory in Epidemiology

  Edinburgh Mathematical Society, December 4, 2023

• Software for Compositional Modeling

  Applied Category Theory 2023, August 2, 2023,
  organized by James Fairbanks, Christina Vasilakopoulou, Sam Staton, Joe Moeller and Priyaa Srinivasan,

  Logic and Semantics Seminar, University of Cambridge, October 18, 2023,

  Theoretical Computer Science Seminar, University of Birmingham, October 20, 2023.

• My Favorite Numbers: 8 and 24

  Quantum Matter in Mathematics and Physics, Harvard University, August 24, 2023,
  organized by Juven Wang.

• Applied Category Theory

  Seminar on Applied Category Theory, University of Kent, June 6, 2023,
  organized by David Corfield.

• The Tenfold Way

  ANZAMP Annual Meeting, February 7, 2023, and

  Algebra, Particles, and Quantum Theory, February 6, 2023,
  organized by Nichol Furey.

• Category Theory in Epidemiology

  African Mathematics Seminar, November 2, 2022,
  organized by Layla Sorkatti.

• Seminar on This Week's Finds

  10 lectures at the University of Edinburgh, September-December, 2022,
  organized by Tom Leinster.

• Mysteries in Fundamental Physics

  Leverhulme Lecture at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, November 27, 2022, and

  Cambridge University Physics Society, October 3, 2018.

• Petri Nets as a Source of Mathematical Structures

  BLAST 2022, Chapman University, August 8-12, 2022,
  organized by José Gil-Ferez, Peter Jipsen, Alexander Kurz and M. Andrew Moshier.

• Decorated versus Structured Cospans and Compositional Modeling with Stock-Flow Diagrams

  Applied Category Theory 2022, July 18-22, 2022,
  organized by Jules Hedges, Jade Master, Fredric Nordvall Forsberg and James Fairbanks.

• Compositional Modeling with Decorated Cospans

  GReTA Seminar, June 29, 2022.
  

• Motivating Motives

  Grothendieck's Approach to Mathematics, Chapman University, May 25, 2022,
  organized by Chapman University, Peter Jipsen, Alexander Kurz, Andrew Mosher, Marco Panza, Ahmed Sebbar and Daniele Struppa.

• Shannon Entropy from Category Theory

  Categorical Semantics of Entropy, CUNY Grad Center, May 11, 2020,
  organized by John Terilla.

• Schur Functors

  Department of Mathematics, University of Denver, February 4, 2022, and

  Department of Mathematics, Ohio State University, November 5, 2020.

• Visions for the Future of Physics

  Basic Research Community in Physics: Annual Symposium, November 5, 2021,
  organized by Alexander Thomas.

• Classical Mechanics versus Thermodynamics

  Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, September 23, 2021.

• The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection

  Perimeter Institute Colloquium, September 15, 2021.

• Symmetric Monoidal Categories: a Rosetta Stone

  Finding the Right Abstractions Summit 2021, Topos Institute, May 19, 2021,
  organized by Scott Garrabrant, David Spivak, and Andrew Critch.

• Can We Understand the Standard Model?

  Octonions and the Standard Model, April 5, 2021,
  organized by Latham Boyle and Kirill Krasnov.

• Mathematics in the 21st Century

  Topos Institute Colloquium, March 25, 2021.

• Theoretical Physics in the 21st Century

  Department of Physics, Universidad de Santiago – August 10, 2021, and

  Zürich Theoretical Physics Colloquium — Sustainability Week, March 8, 2021,
  organized by Niklas Beisert and Anna Knörr.

• Structured vs Decorated Cospans

  The Berkeley Seminar, Topos Institute, July 28, 2021, and

  Yorkshire and Midlands Category Seminar, February 5, 2021,
  organized by Simona Paoli, Nicola Gambino and Steve Vickers.

• Ramanujan's Easiest Formula

  Whittier College Math Club, November 20, 2020,
  organized by Brandon Coya.

• Fock Space Techniques for Stochastic Physics

  Seminario de Categorías UNAM, October 7, 2020, and

  Quantum Field Theory Seminar, Mathematics Institute, University of Oxford, March 4, 2014.

• Coarse-Graining Open Markov Processes

  Applied Category Theory 2020, July 7, 2020,
  organized by Brendan Fong, David Myers, Paolo Perrone, and David Spivak.

• Structured Cospans and Open Petri Nets

  MIT Categories Seminar, April 9, 2020, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
  organized by Brendan Fong, Paulo Perrone and David Spivak.

• Structured Cospans and Double Categories

  ACT@UCR Seminar, April 1, 2020, U.C. Riverside,
  organized by John Baez, Joe Moeller and Christian Williams.

• Applied Category Theory at UCR – 2019

  AMS Western Sectional Meeting, November 9-10, 2019, U. C. Riverside,
  organized by John Baez and Joe Moeller.

• Structured Cospans

  Category Theory 2019, July 11, 2019, University of Edinburgh, Scotland,
  organized by Steve Awodey, Richard Garner, Chris Heunen, Tom Leinster and Christina Vasilakopoulou.

• Applied Category Theory Talks at QPL2019

  Quantum Physics and Logic 2019, June 10-14, 2019, Chapman University, California,
  organized by Bob Coecke and Matt Leifer.

• Applied Category Theory Talks at SYCO4

  Fourth Symposium on Compositional Structures, May 22-23, 2019, Chapman University, California,
  organized by Alexander Kurz.

• Mysteries of the Periodic Table

  Frontiers of Science Lecture, Georgia Tech, April 2, 2019,
  organized by Matt Baker.

• Hidden Symmetries of the Hydrogen Atom

  School of Mathematics Colloquium, Georgia Tech, April 2, 2019.
  

• From Classical to Quantum and Back

  Foundations of the Geometric Science of Information 2019, Montpellier, February 6, 2019,
  organized by Damien Calaque.

• The Mathematics of the 21st Century

  U. C. Riverside, January 8, 2019.

• Getting to the Bottom of Noether's Theorem

  Centre for Quantum Technology, September 14, 2018,

  DAMTP, University of Cambridge, October 4, 2018, and

  The Philosophy and Physics of Noether's Theorems: A Centenary Conference on the 1918 Work of Emmy Noether, London, October 7, 2018,
  organized by Bryan W. Roberts and Nicholas Teh.

• Props in Network Theory

  Applied Category Theory 2018, Lorentz Center, Leiden, April 23 - May 4, 2018,
  organized by Bob Coecke, Brendan Fong, Aleks Kissinger, Martha Lewis and Joshua Tan.

• The Mathematics of Networks

  Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin, April 5, 2018.

• Applied Category Theory at UCR – 2017

  AMS Western Sectional Meeting, U. C. Riverside, November 4-5, 2017,
  organized by John Baez.

• The Rise and Spread of Algebraic Topology

  Applied Algebraic Topology 2017, Hokkaido University, August 8-12, 2017,
  organized by Zin Arai, Pawe Dotko, Kathryn Hess, Yasuaki Hiraoka, Daisuke Kishimoto, Hiroshi Kokubu, Ran Levi, Dai Tamaki and Toru Ohmoto.
  

• The Dodecahedron, the Icosahedron and E₈

  Annual General Meeting, Hong Kong Mathematical Society, May 20, 2017.
  

• Biology as Information Dynamics

  Biological Complexity: Can it be Quantified?, Beyond Center, February 2, 2017,
  organized by Paul Davis, and

  Stanford Complexity Group, April 20, 2017,
  organized by Aaron Goodman.
  

  General Biology Seminar, Caltech, November 13, 2017.

• Compositionality in Network Theory

  Workshop on Compositionality, Simons Institute of Computing, December 6, 2016,
  organized by Samson Abramsky, Lucien Hardy and Michael Mislove.

• Computation and Thermodynamics

  Statistical Physics, Information Processing and Biology, Santa Fe Institute, November 16, 2016,
  organized by David Krakauer, Michael Lachmann, Manfred Laubichler, Peter Stadler, and David Wolpert.

• Monoidal Categories of Networks

  Colloquium, Santa Fe Institute, November 15, 2016.

• The Harmonograph

  Bridges Lecture Series,
  St. Jerome University, Waterloo, Canada, February 26, 2016,
  organized by Benoit Charbonneau and Alysia Kolentsis with help from Linda Carson.

• The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

  Canadian Mathematical Society Winter Meeting,
  Montreal, December 5, 2015.

• Network Theory

  Broadcom, November 18, 2015, hosted by Ray Gomez.

• Categories in Control and Circuits, Categories and Rewrite Rules

  Higher-Dimensional Rewriting and Applications,
  Warsaw, June 28-29, 2015, organized by Yves Guiraud, Phillipe Malbos and Samuel Mimram.

• Network Theory

  Categorical Foundations of Network Theory,
  Institute for Scientific Interchange, Turin, Italy, May 25-28, 2015, organized by Jacob Biamonte and John Baez.

• Information and Entropy in Biological Systems

  NIMBioS Workshop: Information and Entropy,
  National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville, Tennessee, April 8, 2015, organized by John Baez, Marc Harper and John Harte.

• Split Octonions and the Rolling Ball

  Geometry-Analysis-Physics Seminar, Pennsylvania State University, April 14, 2015,

  Mathematics Department, University of York, April 15, 2015, and

  8th Minimeeting on Differential Geometry, CIMAT, Guanajuato, Mexico, December 16, 2015.

• Climate Networks

  Neural Information Processing Seminar 2014, Montreal, December 10, 2014.

• Biodiversity, Entropy and Thermodynamics

  Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory,
  Banff International Research Station, October 29, 2014, organized by Toby Berger, Andrew Eckford and Peter Thomas.

• Network Theory

  Category Theory at the Crossroads,
  Schloss Dagstuhl, May 2, 2014, organized by Samson Abramsky, John Baez, Fabio Gadducci, and Viktor Winschel.

• Network Theory

  4 talks, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, February 21 - March 10, 2014.

• Operads and the Tree of Life

  Topology Seminar, University of Oxford, February 24, 2014, and
  

  Journées de la Fédération de recherche en mathématiques de Paris-Centre, May 20, 2014, organized by Pierre-Louis Curien, Hugo Herbelin and Paul-André Melliès.

• Categories in Control

  Mathematical Physics Seminar, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, February 5, 2014.

• Life's Struggle to Survive

  SETI Institute, December 17, 2013, organized by Adrian Brown.

• What Is Climate Change and What To Do About It?

  Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, October 25-26, 2013, organized by Simon Dalby.

• Spans and the Categorified Heisenberg Algebra

  Catégories, Logiques, Etc..., Université Paris Diderot, May 21, 2014, organized by Anatole Khelif, and

  Quantum Mathematics and Computation Symposium, University of Oxford, October 1, 2013, organized by Samson Abramsky, Bob Coecke, Michael Colins, Chris Douglas, Kobi Kremnitzer, Ulrike Tillmann and Jamie Vicary, and

  Higher Structures in China IV, Lanzhou University, August 14-16, 2013.

• The Foundations of Applied Mathematics

  Category-Theoretic Foundations of Mathematics Workshop, U. C. Irvine, May 5, 2013, organized by Michael Ernst.

• Milankovitch Cycles and the Earth's Climate

  Climate Science Seminar, California State University, Northridge, April 26, 2013.

• Energy and the Environment - What Physicists Can Do

  Perimeter Institute, colloquium, April 17, 2013.

• The Mathematics of Planet Earth

  SAMS 2012,
  Stellenbosch University, October 30, 2012, organized by the South African Mathematical Society and the African Institute of Mathematics.

• Diversity, Entropy and Thermodynamics

  Exploratory Conference on the Mathematics of Biodiversity,
  Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Barcelona, July 5, 2012, organized by Tom Leinster and Richard Reeve.

• Energy, the Environment and What We Can Do

  Google, February 13, 2012, with help from Trevor Blackwell and Anybots.

• Probabilities Versus Amplitudes

  CQT Annual Symposium 2011,
  Centre for Quantum Technologies, December 7, 2011.

• Operads and the Tree of Life

  Combinatorics Seminar, Université du Québec à Montréal, July 8, 2011.

• Energy, the Environment and What Mathematicians Can Do

  Mathematics Department Colloquium, Hong Kong University, March 23, 2011, organized by Jiang-hua Lu.

• Higher Gauge Theory, Division Algebras and Superstrings

  Workshop on Geometry and Lie Groups,
  Hong Kong University, March 25, 2011, organized by Ngaiming Mok, Jiang-hua Lu and Siye Wu.

  Quantum Theory and Gravitation,
  ETH Zürich, June 16, 2011, organized by Matthias Gaberdiel and Jürg Fröhlich.

• Algorithmic Thermodynamics

  Centre for Quantum Technologies, January 6, 2011, organized by Vlatko Vedral.

• Duality in Logic and Physics

  Quantum Physics and Logic 7,
  Oxford University, May 29, 2010, organized by Bob Coecke, Prakash Panangaden, and Peter Selinger.

• Who Discovered the Icosahedron?

  Special Session on History and Philosophy of Mathematics,
  2009 Fall Western Section Meeting of the AMS, UC Riverside, November 7, 2009, organized by Jim Tattersall and Shawnee McMurran.

• Computation and the Periodic Table

  Logic In Computer Science (LICS 2009),
  UCLA, August 11-14, 2009, program chair Andrew Pitts.

• Categorification and Topology

  Workshop on Categorification and Geometrisation from Representation Theory,
  University of Glasgow, April 13-19, 2009, organized by Iain Gordon, Nicolai Reshetikhin, Raphaël Rouquier and Catharina Stroppel.

• Lectures on Higher Gauge Theory

  Workshop on Higher Structures in Topology and Geometry II,
  Courant Research Center Göttingen, February 5-6, 2009, organized by Chenchang Zhu and Giorgio Trentinaglia.

• Groupoidification

  2009 Joint Mathematics Meetings, special session on Categorification and Link Homology,
  Washington D.C., January 7, 2009, organized by Aaron Lauda and Mikhail Khovanov.

• My Favorite Numbers

  The Rankin Lectures,
  University of Glasgow, September 15-19, 2008, supported by the Glasgow Mathematical Journal Trust.

• Computation and the Periodic Table

  Algebraic Topological Methods in Computer Science 2008
  University of Paris Diderot, July 7, 2008, organized by Eric Goubault, Emmanuel Haucourt, Michel Hirschowitz, Sanjeevi Krishnan and Martin Raussen.

• Classifying Spaces for Topological 2-Groups

  Workshop on Categorical Groups,
  Institut de Matemàtica de la Universitat de Barcelona, June 16, 2008, organized by Pilar Carrasco, Josep Elgueta, Joachim Kock and Antonio Rodríguez Garzón.

• Spans in Quantum Theory

  Deep Beauty: Mathematical Innovation and the Search for an Underlying Intelligibility of the Quantum World,
  Princeton, October 3, 2007, organized by Hans Halvorson.

• Higher Gauge Theory and the String Group

  Workshop on Poisson Geometry and Sigma Models,
  Erwin Schrödinger Institute, August 22, 2007, organized by Anton Alekseev, Henrique Bursztyn and Thomas Strobl.

• Higher Gauge Theory and Elliptic Cohomology

  2007 Abel Symposium,
  Oslo, August 8, 2007, organized by Eric Friedlander, Stefan Schwede and Graeme Segal,
  with local organizers Nils Baas, Bjørn Dundas, Bjørn Jahren and John Rognes.

• Cartan Geometry and MacDowell–Mansouri Gravity: the Work of Derek Wise

  Talk at the AstroParticule et Cosmologie group,
  Université Paris 7, July 10, 2007.

• Quantum Quandaries: a Category-Theoretic Perspective

  Philosophical and Formal Foundations of Modern Physics,
  Les Treilles, April 24, 2007.

• The Homotopy Hypothesis

  Higher Categories and Their Applications,
  Fields Institute, January 10, 2007.

• Higher Gauge Theory

  Joint mathematics/physics talk at Louisiana State University, November 16, 2006, and

  Mathematics colloquium at Stanford University, December 7, 2006.

• Tales of the Dodecahedron: From Pythagoras through Plato to Poincaré

  The Reese Prosser Memorial Lecture,
  Mathematics Department, Dartmouth College, November 10, 2006.

• Zooming Out in Time

  Seminars About Long-Term Thinking,
  Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, October 13, 2006.

• Higher-Dimensional Algebra: A Language for Quantum Spacetime

  Colloquium at the Perimeter Institute, May 31, 2006.

• Higher Gauge Theory

  2006 Barrett Lectures - Current Developments in Geometric Topology,
  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, April 29 - May 1, 2006.

• Higher Categories, Higher Gauge Theory

  Unni Namboodiri Lectures, University of Chicago, April 7-11, 2006.

• Fundamental Physics: Where We Stand Today

  Faculté des Sciences, Luminy, Marseille, Feburary 27, 2006.

• Universal Algebra and Diagrammatic Reasoning

  Geometry of Computation 2006,
  January 30-February 3, 2006, Centre International de Recontres Mathématiques (CIRM), Luminy, Marseille, organized by Thomas Ehrhard and Laurent Regnier.

• Higher Gauge Theory: 2-Connections

  the Union College Mathematics Conference,
  December 3-4, 2005, organized by Brenda Johnson, Kathryn Lesh, Susan Niefield, Pedro Teixera and David Vella.

• Towards a Spin Foam Model of Quantum Gravity

  Loops '05,
  conference at the Albert-Einstein-Institut, Potsdam, Germany, October 10-14, 2005.

• Higher Gauge Theory, Homotopy Theory and n-Categories

  Topics in Homotopy Theory,
  graduate summer school at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, University of Calgary, August 22-26, 2005, organized by Kristine Bauer and Laura Scull.

• Higher Gauge Theory

  and

• The Mysteries of Counting: Euler Characteristic Versus Homotopy Cardinality

  Categories in Algebra, Geometry and Mathematical Physics,
  conference in honor of Ross Street's 60th birthday, Macquarie University, Sydney, July 11-16, 2005.

• From Loop Groups to 2-Groups

  U. C. Irvine Algebra Seminar, May 3, 2005.

• Loop Quantum Gravity

  ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms,
  (SODA), Vancouver, British Columbia, January 24, 2005.

• Categorified Gauge Theory

  Arithmetic, Geometry and Topology,
  conference on the occasion of Larry Breen's 60th birthday, Institut Galilée, Université Paris 13, France, December 15, 2004, organized by A. Abbes, S. Lichtenbaum, L. Schwartz and J. Tilouine.

• The Problem of Dynamics in Quantum Gravity

  Workshop on Quantum Gravity in the Americas: Status and Future Directions,
  Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada, October 29, 2004, organized by Etera Livine, Florian Girelli and Thomas Thiemann.

• Loop Quantum Gravity, Quantum Geometry and Spin Foams

  17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation,
  (GR17), Dublin, Ireland, July 20, 2004.

• Why n-Categories?
  

  and

• What n-Categories Should Be Like
  

  and

• Space and State, Spacetime and Process

  n-Categories: Foundations and Applications,
  Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 7 and June 16, 2004, organized by Peter May and John Baez.

• Spin Foam Models

  Non Perturbative Quantum Gravity: Loops and Spin Foams,
  Centre Internationale de Recontres Mathématiques, Luminy, Marseille, France, organized by Laurent Freidel, Phillipe Roche and Carlo Rovelli, May 4, 2004.

• Euler Characteristic versus Homotopy Cardinality

  Fields Institute Program on Applied Homotopy Theory,
  Department of Mathematics, University of Western Ontario, organized by Dan Christensen and Rick Jardine, September 20, 2003.

• Quantum Geometry and its Applications

  Gravitation: a Decennial Perspective,
  Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, Pennsylvania State University, June 9, 2003.

• Building Spacetime from Spin

  Dirac Centenary Conference,
  Baylor University, Waco, Texas, October 1, 2002.

• Categorified Gauge Theory

  2002 Joint Spring Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar and Cascade Topology Seminar,
  University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, May 12, 2002.

• n-Categories in Homology Theory

  Workshop on Algebraic Stacks, Intersection Theory, and Non-Abelian Hodge Theory,
  Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California, April 5, 2002.

• Riemannian Quantum Geometry and Gauge Theory

  4 lectures at Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics,
  conference in honor of Dennis Sullivan's 60th birthday, Department of Mathematics and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Stony Brook, New York, June 14-21, 2001.

• New Developments in Canonical Quantum Gravity

  9th Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics,
  University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, May 24, 2001.

• Simplicial Quantum Geometry

  CUNY Einstein Chair Mathematics Seminar,
  organized by Dennis Sullivan, City University of New York, March 28, 2001.

• Spin Networks, Spin Foams and Quantum Gravity

  Minnowbrook Symposium on Space-Time Structure,
  organized by Kamesh Wali, May 29, 1999.

• Quantum Geometry and Black Hole Entropy

  Program on Classical and Quantum Physics of Strong Gravitational Fields,
  program at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara, organized by Abhay Ashtekar, Gary Horowitz and James Isenberg, April 27, 1999.

© 2013 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu

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