dmurfet

Growing Comprehension

In early 2019 I decided to try to understand the University of Melbourne a little better. I have recorded some observations here in case they are useful for other academics. For updates in early 2020 see down the page. The notes are taken from various University of Melbourne (UoM) official documents, primarily

• 2017 Annual Report

To a first approximation, if you want to understand the University I think you should read the report, ignore the glossy bits, and pay close attention to the statistics on p.13 and the financial data reported beginning on p.124. All references in this section are to the report, unless specified otherwise.

• (Student Demographics) The percentage of international students has increased from 28.9% in 2013 to 39.8% in 2017. The overall number of students has increased from 40,455 in 2013 (median ATAR 94.30) to 50,270 in 2017 (median ATAR 93.65). Austra

dmurfet

S2 2019

According to the history of logic in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, logic emerged from the study of philosophical arguments, and the realisation that were general patterns by which one could distinguish valid and invalid forms of argumentation. The systematic study of logic was begun by Aristotle, who established a system of formal rules and strategy for reasoning. The use of the word strategy is intentional:

The practice of such techniques in Aristotle’s day was actually competitive, and Aristotle was especially interested in strategies that could be used to “win” such “games.” Naturally, the ability to predict the “answer” that a certain line of questioning would yield represented an important advantage in such competitions. Aristotle noticed that in some cases the answer is completely predictable—viz., when it is (in modern terminology) a logical consequence of earlier answers. Thus, he was led from the study of interrogative techniques to

dmurfet

Constructing A-infinity categories of matrix factorisations

I am making publicly available my hand-written working notes for the paper "Constructing A-infinity categories of matrix factorisations" in the same spirit that I made available the other notes on my webpage The Rising Sea. Obviously you should not expect these notes to be as coherent, or readable, as the final paper, but those marked on the first page as (checked) are indeed checked, to the same level of rigour that I apply to any of my published papers. And they often contain more details than the paper. I hope you find them useful!

Notes directly used in writing the paper

The main references, written in the same notation and from the same outlook as the final paper, are given below. You should probably start with (ainfmf28). Some of these PDF files are large, you have been warned.

• (ainfmf28), ([ainfmf29](http://therisings

dmurfet

Notes

The rough area at the moment is moduli of A-infinity structures in geometry.

• Homological algebra, category theory
  • General category theory (Borceux, Mitchell, Stenstrom, Maclane-Moerdijk)
  • General homological algebra (Weibel, Hilton-Stammbach)
  • Hochschild homology and cohomology (Loday, Lipman)
  • Coalgebras (Sweedler)
• Triangulated categories (Neeman)

dmurfet

Some thoughts on supervision

As a PhD student you are optimising for a goal with a long time horizon (in the first case to complete a PhD, but then perhaps also to obtain a permanent research position, which could take much longer) and it is hard to determine the correlation between any given intermediate action and eventual success (whatever you define that to be, but two large components could be prove beautiful theorems and get a job). This brute fact lies at the root of much stress and uncertainty. How does one prove beautiful theorems? How does one get a job?

Well, who knows, but certainy not by trying to directly optimise for a goal with a decade long time horizon, and this degree of uncertainty! You have to develop shorter term proxy goals, and it seems to me that part of the job of a supervisor is to assist in that development. If you want to prove beautiful theorems and get a job, then since it is difficult to infer from first principles the algorithm for doing either of those things, a r

dmurfet

Student areas of interest MAST30026 S2 2018

• Physics, pure and applied maths, chemistry
• Computer science, AI, physics
• Physics
• Pure math, fluid mechanics
• Mathematical physics, puremaths
• Physics, quantum physics, abstract algebra, category theory
• Physics
• Pure math, applied math, biology