# Tag: topos

Some months ago, Peter Scholze wrote a guest post on the Xena-blog: Liquid tensor experiment, proposing a challenge to formalise the proof of one of his results with Dustin Clausen on condensed mathematics.

Scholze and Clausen ran a masterclass in Copenhagen on condensed mathematics, which you can binge watch on YouTube starting here

Scholze also gave two courses on the material in Bonn of which the notes are available here and here.

Condensed mathematics claims that topological spaces are the wrong definition, and that one should replace them with the slightly different notion of condensed sets.

So, let’s find out what a condensed set is.

Definition: Condensed sets are sheaves (of sets) on the pro-étale site of a point.

(there’s no danger we’ll have to rewrite our undergraduate topology courses just yet…)

In his blogpost, Scholze motivates this paradigm shift by observing that the category of topological Abelian groups is not Abelian (if you put a finer topology on the same group then the identity map is not an isomorphism but doesn’t have a kernel nor cokernel) whereas the category of condensed Abelian groups is.

It was another Clausen-Scholze result in the blogpost that caught my eye.

But first, for something completely different.

In “Musical creativity”, Guerino Mazzola and co-authors introduce a seven steps path to creativity.

Here they are:

1. Exhibiting the open question
2. Identifying the semiotic context
3. Finding the question’s critical sign
4. Identifying the concept’s walls
5. Opening the walls
6. Displaying extended wall perspectives
7. Evaluating the extended walls

Looks like a recipe from distant flower-power pot-infused times, no?

In Towards a Categorical Theory of Creativity for Music, Discourse, and Cognition, Mazzola, Andrée Ehresmann and co-authors relate these seven steps to the Yoneda lemma.

1. Exhibiting the open question = to understand the object $A$
2. Identifying the semiotic context = to describe the category $\mathcal{C}$ of which $A$ is an object
3. Finding the question’s critical sign = $A$ (?!)
4. Identifying the concept’s walls = the uncontrolled behaviour of the Yoneda functor
$@A~:~\mathcal{C} \rightarrow \mathbf{Sets} \qquad C \mapsto Hom_{\mathcal{C}}(C,A)$
5. Opening the walls = finding an objectively creative subcategory $\mathcal{A}$ of $\mathcal{C}$
6. Displaying extended wall perspectives = calculate the colimit $C$ of a creative diagram
7. Evaluating the extended walls = try to understand $A$ via the isomorphism $C \simeq A$.

(Actually, I first read about these seven categorical steps in another paper which might put a smile on your face: The Yoneda path to the Buddhist monk blend.)

Remains to know what a ‘creative’ subcategory is.

The creative moment comes in here: could we not find a subcategory
$\mathcal{A}$ of $\mathcal{C}$ such that the functor
$Yon|_{\mathcal{A}}~:~\mathcal{C} \rightarrow \mathbf{PSh}(\mathcal{A}) \qquad A \mapsto @A|_{\mathcal{A}}$
is still fully faithful? We call such a subcategory creative, and it is a major task in category theory to find creative categories which are as small as possible.

All the ingredients are here, but I had to read Peter Scholze’s blogpost before the penny dropped.

Let’s try to view condensed sets as the result of a creative process.

1. Exhibiting the open question: you are a topologist and want to understand a particular compact Hausdorff space $X$.
2. Identifying the semiotic context: you are familiar with working in the category $\mathbf{Tops}$ of all topological spaces with continuous maps as morphisms.
3. Finding the question’s critical sign: you want to know what differentiates your space $X$ from all other topological spaces.
4. Identifying the concept’s walls: you can probe your space $X$ with continuous maps from other topological spaces. That is, you can consider the contravariant functor (or presheaf on $\mathbf{Tops}$)
$@X~:~\mathbf{Tops} \rightarrow \mathbf{Sets} \qquad Y \mapsto Cont(Y,X)$
and Yoneda tells you that this functor, up to equivalence, determines the space $X$ upto homeomorphism.
5. Opening the walls: Tychonoff tells you that among all compact Hausdorff spaces there’s a class of pretty weird examples: inverse limits of finite sets (or a bit pompous: the pro-etale site of a point). These limits form a subcategory $\mathbf{ProF}$ of $\mathbf{Tops}$.
6. Displaying extended wall perspectives: for every inverse limit $F \in \mathbf{ProF}$ (for ‘pro-finite sets’) you can look at the set $\mathcal{X}(F)=Cont(F,X)$ of all continuous maps from $F$ to $X$ (that is, all probes of $X$ by $F$) and this functor
$\mathcal{X}=@X|_{\mathbf{ProF}}~:~\mathbf{ProF} \rightarrow \mathbf{Sets} \qquad F \mapsto \mathcal{X}(F)$
is a sheaf on the pre-etale site of a point, that is, $\mathcal{X}$ is the condensed set associated to $X$.
7. Evaluating the extended walls: Clausen and Scholze observe that the assignment $X \mapsto \mathcal{X}$ embeds compact Hausdorff spaces fully faithful into condensed sets, so we can recover $X$ up to homeomorphism as a colimit from the condenset set $\mathcal{X}$. Or, in Mazzola’s terminology: $\mathbf{ProF}$ is a creative subcategory of $\mathbf{(cH)Tops}$ (all compact Hausdorff spaces).

It would be nice if someone would come up with a new notion for me to understand Mazzola’s other opus “The topos of music” (now reprinted as a four volume series).

No kidding, this is the final sentence of Le spectre d’Atacama, the second novel by Alain Connes (written with Danye Chéreau (IRL Mrs. AC) and his former Ph.D. advisor Jacques Dixmier).

The book has a promising start. Armand Lafforet (IRL AC) is summoned by his friend Rodrigo to the Chilean observatory Alma in the Altacama desert. They have observed a mysterious spectrum, and need his advice.

Armand drops everything and on the flight he lectures the lady sitting next to him on proofs by induction (breaking up chocolate bars), and recalls a recent stay at the La Trappe Abbey, where he had an encounter with (the ghost of) Alexander Grothendieck, who urged him to ‘Follow the motif!’.

“Comment était-il arrivé là? Il possédait surement quelques clés. Pourquoi pas celles des songes?” (How did he get
there? Surely he owned some keys, why not those of our dreams?)

A few pages further there’s this on the notion of topos (my attempt to translate):

“The notion of space plays a central role in mathematics. Traditionally we represent it as a set of points, together with a notion of neighborhood that we call a ‘topology’. The universe of these new spaces, ‘toposes’, unveiled by Grothendieck, is marvellous, not only for the infinite wealth of examples (it contains, apart from the ordinary topological spaces, also numerous instances of a more combinatorial nature) but because of the totally original way to perceive space: instead of appearing on the main stage from the start, it hides backstage and manifests itself as a ‘deus ex machina’, introducing a variability in the theory of sets.”

So far, so good.

We have a mystery, tidbits of mathematics, and allusions left there to put a smile on any Grothendieck-aficionado’s face.

But then, upon arrival, the story drops dead.

Rodrigo has been taken to hospital, and will remain incommunicado until well in the final quarter of the book.

As the remaining astronomers show little interest in Alain’s (sorry, Armand’s) first lecture, he decides to skip the second, and departs on a hike to the ocean. There, he takes a genuine sailing ship in true Jules Verne style to the lighthouse at he end of the world.

All this drags on for at least half a year in time, and two thirds of the book’s length. We are left in complete suspense when it comes to the mysterious Atacama spectrum.

Perhaps the three authors deliberately want to break with existing conventions of story telling?

I had a similar feeling when reading their first novel Le Theatre Quantique. Here they spend some effort to flesh out their heroine, Charlotte, in the first part of the book. But then, all of a sudden, their main character is replaced by a detective, and next by a computer.

Anyway, when Armand finally reappears at the IHES the story picks up pace.

The trio (Armand, his would-be-lover Charlotte, and Ali Ravi, Cern’s computer guru) convince CERN to sell its main computer to an American billionaire with the (fake) promise of developing a quantum computer. Incidentally, they somehow manage to do this using Charlotte’s history with that computer (for this, you have to read ‘Le Theatre Quantique’).

By their quantum-computing power (Shor and quantum-encryption pass the revue) they are able to decipher the Atacame spectrum (something to do with primes and zeroes of the zeta function), send coded messages using quantum entanglement, end up in the Oval Office and convince the president to send a message to the ‘Riemann sphere’ (another fun pun), and so on, and on.

The book ends with a twist of the classic tale of the mathematician willing to sell his soul to the devil for a (dis)proof of the Riemann hypothesis:

After spending some time in purgatory, the mathematician gets a meeting with God and asks her the question “Is the Riemann hypothesis true?”.

“Of course”, God says.

“But how can you know that all non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function have real part 1/2?”, Armand asks.

And God replies:

“Simple enough, I can see them all at once. But then, don’t forget I’m God. I can see the disappointment in your face, yes I can read in your heart that you are frustrated, that you desire an explanation…

Well, we’re going to fix this. I will call archangel Gabriel, the angel of geometry, he will make you a topos!”

If you feel like running to the nearest Kindle store to buy “Le spectre d’Atacama”, make sure to opt for a package deal. It is impossible to make heads or tails of the story without reading “Le theatre quantique” first.

But then, there are worse ways to spend an idle week than by binge reading Connes…

Edit (February 28th). A short video of Alain Connes explaining ‘Le spectre d’Atacama’ (in French)