Wednesday, May 11
1:00 PM -
4:30 PM EDT
Room 5209 and via Zoom
watch the tutorial
In this tutorial for graduate students and postdocs, John Baez and Tai-Danae Bradley (GC alum, class of 2020) will introduce material related to the upcoming symposium, Categorical Semantics of Entropy (Friday, May 13). John Baez will present via Zoom; Tai-Danae Bradley will present in person in Room 5209.
Lunch will be provided at 12:00pm before the tutorial in Room 5209. All participants, especially students, are welcome to join. Please let us know if you plan to attend so we can plan for lunch accordingly.
Abstracts and slides are available below.
12:00 - 1:00
Lunch in Room 5209
1:00 - 2:30
Shannon entropy from category theory
John Baez
University of California Riverside; Centre for Quantum Technologies (Singapore); Topos Institute
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2:30 - 3:00
Coffee break
3:00 - 4:30
Operads and entropy
Tai-Danae Bradley
The Master’s University; Sandbox AQ
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John Baez, University of California, Riverside; Centre for Quantum Technologies; Topos Institute
Shannon entropy is a powerful concept. But what properties single out Shannon entropy as special? Instead of focusing on the entropy of a probability measure on a finite set, it can help to focus on the "information loss", or change in entropy, associated with a measure-preserving function. Shannon entropy then gives the only concept of information loss that is functorial, convex-linear and continuous. This is joint work with Tom Leinster and Tobias Fritz.
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Tai-Danae Bradley, The Master’s University; Sandbox AQ
This talk will open with a basic introduction to operads and their representations, with the main example being the operad of probabilities. I’ll then give a light sketch of how this framework leads to a small, but interesting, connection between information theory, abstract algebra, and topology, namely a correspondence between Shannon entropy and derivations of the operad of probabilities.
Organized by John Terilla (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center). Sponsored in part by the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences and by the CUNY doctoral program in Mathematics, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.