TopOx
A public-facing seminar run (sporadically) in partnership with the Oxford Mathematics and Computer Science departments, and held in-person in Oxford. We invite speakers for both technical and community-engagement talks related to Category Theory, Logic, Type Theory, Computer Science, and other related disciplines.
We fully intend for all talks to be recorded and publicly uploaded, but unfortunately technical problems have meant that we have been unable to do so for our first two talks.
Previous talks
Testing artificial mathematical intelligence
Emily Riehl, 1st of July 2025
As Thurston describes in his famous essay “On proof and progress in mathematics,” the answer to the question “What is it that mathematicians accomplish?” is multifaceted. Inspired by Turing’s “Computing machinery and intelligence,” we propose a series of tests to help identify whether a generative AI system can meaningfully contribute to the process of doing mathematics.
Remarks on local state classifiers
Peter Johnstone, 13th of May 2025
In a recent paper, Ryuya Hora introduced a remarkable new concept called a local state classifier, and showed that (when it exists) it provides a solution to Lawvere’s problem of parametrizing the hyperconnected quotients of a given topos by structures internal to the topos. However, he left some questions unanswered. This talk will describe Hora’s construction , together with my attempts to answer the outstanding questions, and some new examples.