25.4.08

 

Alien Category Theory

From Glory, by Greg Egan, a story about one alien race trying to uncover the mathematics of another alien race, three million years old.

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube, one of the Niah's favorite forms. You could think of a square with four different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square. If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of
the square, then across: either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets, and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on.

That a theorem took this form didn't guarantee its importance; it was easy to cook up trivial examples of sets and maps that commuted. The Niah didn't carve trivia into their timeless ceramic, though, and this theorem was no exception. The seven-dimensional commuting hypercube established a dazzlingly elegant correspondence between seven distinct, major branches of Niah mathematics, intertwining their most important concepts into a uniļ¬ed whole. It was a result Joan had never seen before: no mathematician anywhere in the Amalgam, or in any ancestral culture she had studied, had reached the same insight.


Comments:
I am a big fan of Greg Egan's work. He is very under-appreciated in the U.S. and can rarely be found on bookstore shelves, but the story "Glory" is up for a Hugo under the Best Novelette category.

"Dark Integers" is also nominated, so he is literally in competition with himself! Egan is also a programmer, and has a lot of interesting non-fiction on his own web site (just Google Greg Egan).
 
When reading that passage in the story a few weeks ago, my first thought was that if there isn't already a hypercube commmuting diagram somewhere in the literate, that it would be a great exercise.
 
There is at least one: Figure 20 in "Symmetric Monoidal and Cartesian Double Categories as a Semantic Framework for Tile Logic" by Bruni, Meseguer and Montanari.
 
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