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Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Nov 09 2020 at 19:11):Has anyone ever came across this series of books? https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B086K5MTNJ/ref=series_dp_rw_ca_1
The author claims to teach CT using Lego bricks! It's either bs or genius
Nikolaj Kuntner (Nov 09 2020 at 19:38):Mhm, googling it I find one picture where a CT diagram is "drawn" with legos. Not sure what more it's about. If I'm sceptical, then mostly because the other texts by the author seem not abstract in the mathematicians sense.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Nov 10 2020 at 12:58):Mmh yes, seems to lean towards the bs side
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Nov 10 2020 at 12:58):Sigh
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Nov 10 2020 at 12:58):Lego bricks are my go-to example of compositional systems :laughing:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 25 2021 at 20:39):I've explained topos theory with lego before, so it's not so farfetched.
John Baez (Apr 25 2021 at 20:41):Tinker toys define a presheaf category, approximately. (You need to idealize, imagining that if you can stick one gizmo onto a thingamabob you can stick arbitrary many gizmos onto a thingamabob.)
Jade Master (Jul 20 2021 at 22:04):What is this a presheaf category on?
Daniele Palombi (Jul 21 2021 at 11:42):This reminds me of magic lego from the GLA blog by @Pawel Sobocinski
Henry Story (Jul 21 2021 at 11:49):Daniele Palombi said:
This reminds me of magic lego from the GLA blog by Pawel Sobocinski
Oh! that arcticle looks nice. It could actually get me interested in Lego and give me a way to play with the twins who just turned 5!
Dual birthday cakes for our Twins. https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1410931152161021953/photo/1
- The 🐟 BabelFish (@bblfish)The "Visual Category Theory Brick by Brick" book discussed further up looks like it just is about building diagrams with lego bricks, which I can see as being of interest to someone both really interested in Cats and with a Lego fetish.
Henry Story (Jul 21 2021 at 13:43):Ah it looks like Pawel starts with Magic Legos and then moves on to string diagrams in a series of over 15 blog posts. Does he get back to Legos at some point?
(Anyway, these articles are really readable. I'll see if I can make the links back to Legos myself...)
A thought: if one could make an game for tablet or large smart phone with magic legos, that would reveal when asked the underlying matrix logic then one could get children age 5 and above to play it and get the intuitions for linear algebra perhaps. One would need a game designer of course to build it up in an interesting way.
Henry Story (Jul 21 2021 at 13:55):With a bit of thought, I think one could also do this as a hyper-app with magic lego descriptions published on the web in a way that would be linkeable, so that one could use components built by others to build larger ones, using the Solid platform.
Henry Story (Jul 22 2021 at 04:28):Btw slighly tangential to this (but perhaps we can extend the topic to "ct games") is this game Monument Valley which is stunningly beautiful exploration of Escher like spaces. (I associate Escher with maths because of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach which I read as a teen but never quite finished reading). My kids loved Monument Valley and so they have now a deep Escher imagination at age 5. Weirdly that game seems to point to those spaces not being impossible as usually thought.
Anyway, if one could produce mathematical games with that level of artistry, one could get perhaps get children to zoom past the current curriculum.
Henry Story (Jul 22 2021 at 04:36):Another way of looking at this is that if millions of children are playing with Escher spaces now, in 5 years they may be happy to know the mathematics of those. (I hope there is some :hushed: )
David Michael Roberts (Jul 22 2021 at 05:47):@Henry Story those look amazing, thanks for sharing!
Jason Erbele (Jul 25 2021 at 13:59):Henry Story said:
Ah it looks like Pawel starts with Magic Legos and then moves on to string diagrams in a series of over 15 blog posts. Does he get back to Legos at some point?
Bit of a late reply, as I suspect you may have already found the answer yourself. To my recollection, Magic Legos on the Graphical Linear Algebra blog, like football/soccer, is a one-off thing used to help motivate string diagrams, which is the central graphical idea there.