Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It looks similar to Homotopy Type Theory, which also attempts to connect seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics into one.

I wonder if there’s a generic name for these things. Unifying theories? Category theory? We don’t tend to see serious attempts outside of mathematics and physics, which I believe is a missed opportunity.

So many fields seem to be fairly homomorphic, yet very few people seem to notice. For example, electricity transmission, water distribution, telecommunication, transportation networks, and electronic circuits are pretty much identical yet use completely distinct vocabularies. The same is true for apps and multimedia (movie, tv, book, radio, album, game, newspaper, magazine, phone) which first appear to be discrete concepts, but actually exist on a continuous spectrum.

I believe that the complexity of today’s world is merely magnified by our choice of words. A semantic refactoring might just be the best way to improve humanity’s productivity.



The Langlands program is not similar to homotopy type theory. It is 'unifying' only in the sense that it makes striking, deep, yet very concrete[0] connections between 2 seemingly disparate areas of math, and because of this the tools needed to make progress in it end up touching all areas of mathematics.

Homotopy type theory is more for about foundations of math stuff, i.e. which axioms you use to prove things. ZFC is by far the most common system to work within, not HTT.

[0] ..despite taking years of study to understand the conjectures


Graph theories are used for all of your cited examples to explain how they work. They are well studied group homomorphic feature kernels in algebra.


I believe these are referred to as formal theories and are sort of the root connections between philosophy/epistemology and maths.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: