(In the process of getting involved, and wondering what you need to do next? I’ve now put everything under the AGITTOC 2020 tab up top.)
Hi everyone,
(Perhaps I should somehow flag the important posts, so I feel comfortable continuing to post often.)
Reminder: first pseudolecture will be Saturday June 27, 2020, at 8 am Pacific time.
The groups and groupoids are set up, and it’s time for people to meet each other. Here is how it will. Most people will be in some group (possibly even some of you who didn’t want to be). They vary in size, and each group is hoped to have some commonality. You should be grouped with people you wanted to be grouped with. You’ll get invited to zulip soon (in the next day I think). So you can go there and check it out, and also meet others in your group. Probably it would make sense if we tell you (on zulip) who is in your group. Only group members (and people doing stuff for AGITTOC) will have access to your group, although I think you can open it up further; we will all figure out the functionality of zulip together.
Each group has a number for convenience. They should probably have names too, and some of them basically already do because they were pre-made. Others contain smaller groups within them. But if you want a name, that should be easy to add.
Your group can talk there (and post pdfs, and videochat internally to zulip, etc.). If you want, if discord is easier, you can just set up DMs on discord, for example — just figure out what works well, and experiment.
There are a number of groupoids (about seven), and each group is in a groupoid. (Or for the category theorists: each groupoid has a number of components, each of which is a group.) Some people (who didn’t appear to want to be part of a group) will not be in a regular group, but they’ll still be in a groupoid, so they can have a home base on zulip.
Each groupoid has a shepherd watching over it: Juliette Bruce, Taylor Dupuy, Quinn Greicius, Jack Petok, Maddie Weinstein, and David Zureick-Brown. (The groupoids are called B, D, G, P, W, and Z.) There are also some other shepherds-at-large: David Lin, Jackson Morrow, Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj, and Sasha Shmakov. (If something comes up, and it’s just easier for you to bring it up in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, or Russian, you can talk to David Lin, Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj, Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj, and Sasha Shmakov respectively.) The shepherds aren’t TAs or even pseudo-TAs; they are all AGITTOC participants who are also volunteering their time to figure out how to make this work, and are sort of intermediaries between me and everyone else, so I don’t get even more overwhelmed.
Questions and comments for the pseudolectures will work as follows. You can watch on youtube live (instructions before too long when I get around to it; thanks to Dev Sinha). The shepherds, and those who can’t easily access youtube, will watch on zoom. My slides should be available in nearly real time (ie, after I finish with a slide, it should be available) on dropbox (instructions later when I get around to it — thanks to Yufei Zhao for explaining this). For questions and discussion, each groupoid will have a channel on zulip or discord (not yet decided — we can figure out what works better). Then during the lecture, a shepherd will watch that channel, and perhaps ask some of the questions out loud to me.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something I meant to write, but I’ll write another post before long, so it doesn’t matter too much.
June 19, 2020 at 7:00 pm
Ravi, can you let us know how much of The Rising Sea to read to prepare for the first lecture? And in general, tell us, say, the week before?
June 22, 2020 at 11:50 am
Hi David, Yes, I’d like to do that and am hoping in general. For this first week, I’m going to try to set the stage and propose a way of proceeding, so there will be content but also more philosophy — I’ll discuss some category theory, so reading as much of chapter 1 in advance that is comfortable is ideal. (People of different backgrounds should find different amounts “right”. I won’t discuss spectral sequences now, and for some just seeing categories for the first time will be strange; for others adjoints will be new and hard. and for others the frontier might be something around the FHHF theorem, or the magic diagram.) One central idea I hope many people are going to be ready for (and many even believing they are happy with) is that of universal properties, and why one might care.
I hope very much people will be asking themselves at every stage “why should I care about this?” Those with more experience often do this as a matter of course. Those with less experience are more willing to take things on the basis of faith in authority.
July 13, 2020 at 8:51 am
Hi, I was wondering if the registration is still open?
July 23, 2020 at 9:36 pm
Yes, just sign up!