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Chris Oei (Feb 12 2023 at 18:31):Around '90 or '91, my advisor in the physics department showed me a paper. Something about representing knots using the same notation we'd been using for tensors. I thought, OK, that's pretty interesting and convenient way of describing knots.
And then there was something about how a simple topological property about knots, represented in this weird tensor notation, turned out to be the Yang Baxter equation. https://www.christopheroei.com/s2/7363d819215d87a54b86360e8af0d70899fbd99322d371baa5bfdc90723c9e11.txt
It was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that, and my advisor and I were both scratching our heads. It seemed like there was something marvelous and profound about it, but I had no idea what it was. I left the physics world and got into computer science soon afterwards, and haven't thought about it much since then.
And then yesterday I found https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta/rose3.pdf
I wish I'd heard of category theory earlier.
Notification Bot (Feb 15 2023 at 22:52):This topic was moved here from #general: off-topic > Knots and Yang-Baxter by Matteo Capucci (he/him).
Nicolas Blanco (Feb 18 2023 at 12:58):I love this paper (the Rosetta Stone one). Reading it is what got me interested in category theory in the first place.
John Baez (Feb 18 2023 at 18:23):Great! I'm so glad I wrote it with @Mike Stay - without him coming to UCR the computer science section aspects would not have been possible.