Graduate Student Seminar - Luis Scoccola (Math)

Title: Monoidal categories, string diagrams, and Markov categories

Speaker: Luis Scoccola

Abstract: Monoidal categories are categories with a notion of product that is weaker than the categorical product. This relaxation allows for many interesting examples coming from topology, logic, physics, and probability theory. 

I will introduce monoidal categories and string diagrams, a graphical calculus to work with diagrams in monoidal categories, and I will go over several examples, paying particular attention to the ones coming from probability theory. This will motivate the definition of Markov category, an abstraction that lets us study probabilistic concepts such as marginalization, conditionals, Markov processes, almost sure equality, and deterministic maps diagrammatically.

As always, great food, coffee and drinks will be provided!

We hope to see you all this Friday! We encourage your participation in the seminar to provide continuity to this project.

You can visit the Grad Seminar website at: https://uwomathgrad.github.io/editions/winter2020/.