(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.)

As most of you clearly know, by now the groups and groupoids have homes on zulip. You should (unless you signed up recently) have been invited to zulip. Even if you’re busy, please go there in the next 48 hours just I know you made it. If you’ve got some relaxed time, you can go and play around and meet people.

You should be in a stream with a name like D012, which means you are in group 12 (12 meaning a line on a spreadsheet). The stream initially is accessible just to your group, and to me and the shepherds (and possibly a few people invited to see how this experiment is working). You have a lot of control — I *think* you can start new streams, and invite people into your stream. Please introduce yourself to others in your stream! Your group has somewhere between around 7 to around 30 unless you wanted to be in a pre-defined group without any others (so there are some groups of size two), or if you are a lone wolf not wanting to be in a group but willing to take part in feedback (in which case you are in a groupoid with the other lone wolves), or if you wanted nothing to do with anyone (in which case you are in a groupoid with all such people like that).

You’ll also be in a groupoid. For example, if you are in D012, then you are in Groupoid D, whose shepherd is (currently) Taylor Dupuy (“D” is for his last name). You have access to that stream on zulip as well. That may be where people ask questions on Saturday (and Taylor or some substitute watches it and may ask me them), and where you can also chat with each other (answering questions on Saturday, or anything else).

The shepherds are a motley crew (some more motley than others):

Juliette Bruce
Taylor Dupuy
Quinn Greicius
David Lin
Alison Miller
Jackson Morrow
Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj
Jack Petok
Sasha Shmakov
Maddie Weinstein
Jonathan Wise
David Zureick-Brown

They aren’t TAs; they are just volunteering to help out. They are also participants in the experiment.

Getting towards actual mathematics

My plan is to have pseudolectures on Saturdays starting at 8 am Pacific time, weekly, to have this episode or instantiation of AGITTOC last until the “end of the summer”. It’s not clear yet what “end of the summer” means, because different people will have natural ending points at different times. (And I won’t even get into those from the southern hemisphere, who already have a hard time walking upside down.)

Given the massive variation in what people know, my intent is to try to keep as many people for as long as possible, which means trying to speak to about three levels at once. I was thinking of speaking for an hour and a half, with a break, in order to squeeze in more content, but I think already with the unusual timing and the unusual nature of the pseudolecture, it will be hard for people to stretch their attentionm, so I should stick to an hour, but perhaps have another hour (unrecorded) for questions and follow-ups. We’ll just watch what happens.

I’m going to use The Rising Sea notes as a skeleton on which to build the lectures, because that’s what I can do most easily, but they are at a wholly inappropriate level for most of you (even those who will be able to stay).

So given the amount of actual time I’ll have to try to make a case to you in pseudo-lectures, clearly anything you get out of this can only come out of your own efforts, so I want to try to set things up to make it as possible as I can for you to learn things, and do things, and discuss things.

The first pseudolecture will necessarily be about setting the stage and laying out the philosophy. You needn’t do any reading in advance, but you can read chunks of the category theory chapter at as slow a rate as possible. (If you aren’t comfortable with rings and modules, it is far better that you review that — ideally take advantage of your new friends as you lay out to each other what you think are the important things to know about them.)

I’ll write more throughout the week. I’m curious and kind of excited to see what might happen. I think a lot of good has already happened in the discussions I’ve seen happening (and more I can’t even see), for example on discord or zulip.