Seminars

Right, that's two seminars out of the four in the Month of Death done. One was the abelian categories seminar, and the other was the preseminar for that - we have a nice tradition at Glasgow whereby someone gives a pre-seminar, giving the background to the actual seminar, so people have a chance in hell of following that. In this case, since half my audience would know what a colimit is, ffs have some measure of categorical sophistication, and half would have none, I decided to give a preseminar on "basic category theory up to (co)limits and enriched categories"¹. It took an hour, went at breakneck speed, and covered what would normally be two or three lectures' worth of material, but I think it helped.

The actual seminar didn't go so well, unfortunately - I hadn't planned my treatment of subobjects properly, so it was a bit confused, and I seriously bollocksed up the definition of exactness. Fortunately (?), however, I didn't actually finish the material (still need to cover exact functors and the embedding theorems), so I get another 20-30 minutes at the start of next week's meeting to redeem myself. Yay.

Then we went to the Departmental Seminar [big invited speaker thing] and I didn't take a word of it in.

[The other two (2.5, now) seminars in the Month of Death are to be on my research (coherence for categorified algebraic theories, if you've lost track) on the 6th, and the mathematics of juggling on the 14th. Of death.]

¹ Colimits unify pretty much every gluing and quotienting process you've heard of. They're great, and lovely for doing theory with. Unfortunately, they tend not to be very easy to use in actual calculations.