Skip to content →

Tag: france

A newish toy in town

In a recent post I recalled Claude Levy-Strauss’ observation “In Paris, intellectuals need a new toy every 15 years”, and gave a couple of links showing that the most recent IHES-toy has been spreading to other Parisian intellectual circles in recent years.

At the time (late sixties), Levy-Strauss was criticising the ongoing Foucault-hype. It appears that, since then, the frequency of a hype cycle is getting substantially shorter.

Ten days ago, the IHES announced that Dustin Clausen (of condensed math fame) is now joining the IHES as a permanent professor.

To me, this seems like a sensible decision, moving away from (too?) general topos theory towards explicit examples having potential applications to arithmetic geometry.

On the relation between condensed sets and toposes, here’s Dustin Clausen talking about “Toposes generated by compact projectives, and the example of condensed sets”, at the “Toposes online” conference, organised by Alain Connes, Olivia Caramello and Laurent Lafforgue in 2021.

Two days ago, Clausen gave another interesting (inaugural?) talk at the IHES on “A Conjectural Reciprocity Law for Realizations of Motives”.

Comments closed

Against toposes

The French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss once observed

“In Paris, intellectuals need a new toy every 15 years.”

Some pointers to applications of their toy of choice for the past ten years:

How do Parisian mathematicians with a lifelong interest in topos theory react to this hype?

With humour!

Here’s an ‘exposé parodique’ (parodical lecture) by Stéphane Dugowson on “Contre les topos” (against toposes).

Comments closed