Quantum Gravity Seminar - Winter 2007

John Baez and Derek Wise

This quarter's seminar will be a continuation of the Fall 2006 seminar. So, we will again discuss two subjects:

As usual, John Baez lectured and Derek Wise took beautiful notes which you can see here. If you discover any errors in these notes, please email me, and we'll try to correct them. We'll keep a list of errors that haven't been fixed yet.

These courses are also available via my blog at the n-Category Café. This is a new experiment, and I hope you try it. Each week's notes comes with a blog entry where you can ask questions, make comments, and chat with other people following the course.

The week numbers for these notes continue where last quarter's notes leave off. The course continues in the Spring.

There are also LaTeX, encapsulated PostScript and xfig files to download if for some bizarre reason you want them. However, we reserve all rights to this work.

Quantization and Cohomology

In last Fall's lectures, we discussed the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches to the classical mechanics of point particles, and sketched how these could be generalized to strings and higher-dimensional membranes by a process that we'll ultimately see as categorification. You can read what we did here: This quarter we're digging deeper into the process of quantization! Here are this quarter's notes: You can also see Derek's hand-written notes, week by week. Each week's notes come with a blog entry where you can read discussions and ask your own questions. There's also some supplementary reading material:

When you're done with all this stuff, go on to the Spring 2007 continutation of this seminar!

Classical versus Quantum Computation

In this continuation of the Fall 2006 seminar on classical versus quantum computation, we explained more precisely the relation between cartesian closed categories and the lambda calculus, and tried to categorify it.

Some — but not all! — of these lectures are summarized and further developed in this long paper:

Here are the lectures notes. Each week's notes comes with a blog entry where you can ask questions and make comments:

This seminar continues, but with a drastic shift towards homotopy theory, in Spring 2007.


© 2007 John Baez and Derek Wise
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu

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