Case Study: Mathematics for All

At Topos, our mission is to make the systems around us work for us all. We believe a necessary step is to provide the opportunity for anyone to understand how they are built, and in turn build and rebuild systems themselves. This means making the mathematics that drives our research and tools accessible, explaining it in plain language, and fighting the biases that skew representation among its users.

Topos advisor John Baez has spearheaded this since the early 1990s, and is widely credited as the world’s first blogger. His blog? Explaining the latest research in quantum mechanics, relativity, and other topics at the cutting edge of physics. Today Professor Baez’s Azimuth blog attracts hundreds of thousands of readers a year, leading discussions about category theory, systems, and what scientists can do to address the global climate crisis.

Just two years after YouTube was founded, Eugenia Cheng and her friend Simon Willerton started filming short category theory lectures on a chalkboard in Cambridge UK. Their YouTube channel now has almost 1 million views. Professor Cheng currently teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her courses on mathematics and category theory for all have been turned into a series of popular bestsellers, including How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics. She is a tireless advocate for inclusivity in mathematics, and recently has begun a series of summer camps for high school teachers and students, showing that deep mathematics like category theory is a playground accessible to everyone.

Topos co-founder David Spivak has received accolades for Category Theory for the Sciences, a book that opened up category theory beyond the realms of pure mathematics. With co-founder Brendan Fong, this was followed by the book An Invitation to Applied Category Theory, and an accompanying MIT OpenCourseWare lecture series.

Topos continues this work, working with top educators in programming like Bartosz Milewski to develop new materials on category theory for programmers, public communications experts at science museums like The Exploratorium to create accessible, fun, and rigorous YouTube videos, and continuing work on summer camps. 

Our dedicated outreach, not just to math majors and Google programmers, but to folks ranging from primary school students to retirees, from artists to engineers, is a critical part of building systems that work for us all.