Welcome to the Topos Blog
Welcome to the Topos blog! Here you’ll find news and announcements, statements of our visions and projects at Topos, expository articles on topics of interest to the Topos community, and reports of research in progress.
Welcome to the Topos blog! Topos is about unlocking the potential of new mathematical ideas to serve humanity. We live in a world increasingly dominated by large-scale systems: international supply chains, the internet, global geopolitics, the Earth’s changing climate. Math has transformed the world over and over, enabling systems from basic currencies and trade, to international air travel, to computers and social media. We believe better abstractions — ones tuned to describing interconnection and its consequences — will help us build systems that are safe, inclusive, robust, and just.
But new math just provides tools for thinking, and tools are what their users make of them. For what purposes will these tools be designed? Who will these users be? In order for these tools to truly serve us all, we believe all parts of society must have a voice in their creation, and have the ability to understand and use their power. We work towards this in many ways. We endeavour to build a diverse team whose perspectives represent a cross-section of society. We uphold and refine traditional scholarly practices of open, peer-reviewed publication, public seminars, and education. And we seek to engage the public in new ways, welcoming the world into Topos, communicating our goals, vision, and work as it happens, and engaging in dialogue to refine our methods. This blog is one part of this engagement.
On this blog, you’ll find news and announcements, statements of our visions and projects at Topos, expository articles on topics of interest to the Topos community, and reports of research in progress.
We’re excited about the blog posts we have lined up in the coming weeks, including introductions to our team and our 2021 summer research intern class, our dreams of improving the ways we share mathematical knowledge, and latest musings on jump monads and dependent types.
For now though, here’s just a peek at our Berkeley and Oxford offices. As we’re opening this blog, we’re also opening our offices, and as you can see it’s still a work in progress. As we unpack these boxes and make strides towards building mathematical tools for public benefit, we hope you’ll join us on this journey, both virtually here on this blog, in our seminars, and in person.
Welcome 😊
