Unnamed points and arrows in "Diagrammatic Immanence" (2020)

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1. Eduardo

Subj: Unnamed points and arrows in "Diagrammatic Immanence"
From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 5 November 2020 at 08:29
To: Jonathan Gangle

Hi Rocco,

I may be saying something shallow or super-biased, but anyway...

I am reading your "Diagrammatic Immanence" starting by the mathematical side of the zigzag and leaving the chapters about Spinoza, Peirce and Deleuze to a second moment, and I noticed that you use some conventions on diagrams that come from Freyd, Scedrov, Schanuel, Rosebrugh, the Reyes, and Zolfaghari...

So: I had a lot of trouble with how they use unnamed points and arrows when I was studying alone, and when I tried to use those kinds of diagrams to communicate with other poeple the difficulties became worse & overwhelming... and over the years I found some nice ways to circumvent those difficulties and make variants of these diagrams that were easier "for children" - in the sense of students who had just completed a course in Discrete Mathematics and who think that the only basic mathematical objects are integer numbers and what we can build from them by taking finite lists and finite sets a finite number of times...

A few months ago I published (on Arxiv) some notes on these alternative conventions for diagrams - here:

http://angg.twu.net/math-b.html#favorite-conventions

and I think that the ones on sections 2 and 5.4 may complement your current conventions in useful ways.

Cheers! =)
Eduardo Ochs
http://angg.twu.net/math-b.html

2. Rocco Gangle

From: Rocco Gangle
Date: 9 November 2020 at 12:20
To: Eduardo Ochs

Hi Eduardo,

Great to hear from you! And much thanks for sending this paper -- it's really great stuff, in many ways a perfect example of what philosophically intrigues me so much about the specifically _pedagogical_ power of diagrams, their way of resolving the problem of how to make intuitions rigorous in a more or less continuous manner. And especially how this works somewhat "internally" to category theory itself. A lot of mathematicians don't care much about this, but I find it philosophically fascinating and also culturally/sociologically important -- we need more general mathematically rigorous thinking among ordinary educated people these days!

My friends/colleagues Gianluca and Fernando and I have been working on the beginnings of a long-term project searching for category theory representations of autopoietic phenomena. Right now, we're looking at the structure of "common knowledge" in epistemic logic and game theory (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/common-knowledge/). We're convinced there's a nice diagrammatic notation for such situations lurking somewhere with deeper category theory constructions in the background.

It's too bad that with the global covid situation, there's little chance of meeting up soon at any conferences, etc. -- but if you're ever interested in talking sometime over Zoom or Skype, just let me know.

Thanks again for sending the paper -- and good luck staying healthy and sane in this difficult bextended moment.
all best wishes,
Rocky

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3. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 9 November 2020 at 14:33
To: Fernando Lucatelli Nunes

Olha que legal esse e-mail que eu recebi!
[[]] =),
E.

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4. Fernando Lucatelli

From: Fernando Lucatelli
Date: 9 November 2020 at 15:16
To: Eduardo Ochs

:-D
Deu uma olhada no trabalho dele?

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5. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 9 November 2020 at 16:36
To: Lucatelli

Sim! Conheço artigos, já li trechos de um livro dele e agora tou lendo outro!

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6. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 24 November 2020 at 05:41
To: Rocco Gangle

Hi Rocco/Rocky!

Sorry for the delay...

So, first: wow! Thanks! Many many many thanks! =)

I am very interesting in talking by Zoom, but I am afraid that I will only be able to do that after december 20, which is when my holidays start... I am trying to cope with covid/quarantine-related anxiety by trying to work on research-related things every time that I can't focus on preparing material for my online-ish classes... on the one hand with this I was just able to finish a draft on how to visualize certain sheaves, I mean, to "finish" it enough to let me show it to real toposophers and ask some questions, but on the hand this means that I often only finish the slides for my classes a few minutes before the classes start, so things are a bit hectic here...

I took a look at this - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/common-knowledge/ -, mainly on the part about the barbecue problem... I thought that I knew that problem reasonably well, but this was the first time that I saw a decent sketch of how to formalize it on modal logic. I didn't have time yet to organize the argument of the "Hierarchical account" in a more visual form...

The thing on "visualizing sheaves" that I mentioned above is here - http://angg.twu.net/math-b.html#clops-and-tops - but almost all the sections in the last part, that will be the one that should be more useful to people that I know who study Badiou, are unfinished...

So: yeah, more soon, take care and sorry for the mess! =) =) =)
Cheers =),
Eduardo

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7. Rocco Gangle

From: Rocco Gangle
Date: 25 February 2021 at 13:48
To: Eduardo Ochs

Hi Eduardo,

Apologies for the break in communication. I hope you are doing well in the new year.

I look forward to continuing our earlier discussion -- for the present, however, I'd like to invite you to contribute a chapter (if you would be interested, of course) for the "Diagrams, Visual Models and Abduction" section of the upcoming Springer Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Gianluca and I are the section co-editors. It would be wonderful to be able to include a chapter from you on diagrams and visual modeling in mathematics/pedagogy of mathematics as a source of abductive reasoning, or a similar topic. Please see the attached letter for details about the project.

If you would be interested in possibly contributing a chapter, please let me know. In any case, it would be great to set up a Zoom conversation sometime in the near future. My schedule is pretty open -- if there are days/times that would be convenient for you any time in the next few weeks, just let me know.

all best wishes,
Rocky

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Attachment: AbductionHandbookPartFInvitationLetterEO.pdf 107K

8. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 25 February 2021 at 18:14
To: Rocco Gangle

Hi Rocky/Rocco!

I have to apologize too... you invited me to chat by Zoom months ago, but I was having to prepare a ton of material for my online classes - it was my first time teaching online, and most of the time I felt totally incompetent, a farce, etc - and I never answered you...

So: yes, I am very interested, both in chatting and on writing the chapter! I have just watched again the video of your talk at the ACT, and printed the paper "A Generic Figures Reconstruction of Peirce's Existential Graphs (Alpha)" - it didn't make much sense when I skimmed through it months ago, but now it makes a bit more...

The idea that helped me to find the way to structure and to write the "Favorite Conventions" paper was: most people find Mac Lane's CWM super hard to read, and some of them reach a second stage in which CWM is "clear" or "obvious" in some sense, but most of the people in this second stage are unable to explain to other people how to fill out the details of the steps that Mac Lane treats as obvious... they just say "it's clear", "it's obvious", and that's it. In [FavC] in I tried to fix that by sketching algorithms, or procedures, to translate some statements from CWM into several languages to get something that looks like a jigsaw puzzle in which we have to try to assemble the pieces that we have and fill out the holes...

A few years ago I tried to do that with the Generic Figures book, but I didn't have enough tools then, and I didn't get far. I will try to do that again in the weekend - I think that I can start with the goal of making both the language of the Generic Figures book and of your paper for the ACT more accessible "to children" in the sense that I've been using that term... that will be just a starting point, of course. I have the sensation that a lot of what I've been doing is closely related to abduction, but I don't know how to formalize this yet.

What are your plans for this monday, march 1st? I will be busy between 18:00 and 20:00 in Rio de Janeiro time - see:

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/personal.html?cities=213,43

but apart from that I'll be free the whole day...

[[]] =),
Eduardo

P.S.: how is your mother? Is everything well?

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9. Rocco Gangle

From: Rocco Gangle
Date: 26 February 2021 at 18:57
To: Eduardo Ochs

Hi Eduardo,

Excellent! Very glad to hear you're interested in contributing a chapter. And looking forward to talking. Yes, Monday March 1 would work fine -- how about 11:00 Rio time (9am Boston time)? Would that work for you? Just let me know if that's good and I can send you my Zoom link.

all best wishes,
Rocky

By the way, I think you may have confused my mother with Gianluca's mother -- Gianluca's mother unfortunately passed away several months ago; she had been sick for quite some time.

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10. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 28 February 2021 at 02:00
To: Rocco Gangle

Hi!
Monday will be perfect for me!
About mothers: ouch! Sorry for the confusion and the clumsiness...
My mother died two weeks before the start of the pandemic after a very long illness, too... =\
All the best, cheers,
E.

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11. Rocco Gangle

From: Rocco Gangle
Date: 28 February 2021 at 20:09
To: Eduardo Ochs

Hi Eduardo,

No worries at all. Looking forward to talking tomorrow. Here's my Zoom link:

https://endicott.zoom.us/j/5618825649

all best wishes,
Rocky

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12. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 1 March 2021 at 10:55
To: Rocco Gangle

Hi Rocky!
I am not totally sure if I'll be able to share my screen on Zoom -
here's a link to Google Meet if Zoom doesn't work well enough:
https://meet.google.com/dyw-srvg-rpj

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13. Eduardo

From: Eduardo Ochs
Date: 1 March 2021 at 11:26
To: Rocco Gangle

http://angg.twu.net/LATEX/idarct-preprint.pdf

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