Hi! Those of you who can understand Italian might be interested in an interview that I shall give for the twitch channel Meet Science next Monday at 21. Here are the poster and abstract for the event:

Nella scienza e più in generale nella vita è importante – e a volte cruciale – cercare analogie e concetti unificanti. Olivia Caramello (Università degli Studi degli Insubria, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques) ci spiega come in matematica e in logica il concetto di topos possa fornirci strumenti per costruire “ponti”  tra diverse teorie e così unificarle. Lunedì 14 dicembre 2020 alle ore 21, su https://www.twitch.tv/meetscience.

In the following recent talk Laurent Lafforgue gives a beautiful overview of the role of categories in Grothendieck’s work and a presentation of some recent developments involving toposes:

Next week, I shall give an online course entitled The geometry of morphisms and equivalences of toposes, as part of the lecture series Topics in contemporary mathematics organized by Alexander Cruz.

I will present a number of fundamental results and constructions on the theme of sites and morphisms of toposes, some of which generalize theorems from SGA4.

In the first part of the course I shall present constructions allowing to turn any morphism of sites into a a comorphism of sites inducing the same geometric morphism (up to equivalence) and conversely; moreover, I shall introduce the notion of weak morphism of toposes and characterize the functors which induce such morphisms.

In the second part, I shall discuss continuous comorphisms of sites, present an explicit characterization for them (also in terms of relative cofinality conditions), and show that this class of comorphisms includes all fibrations as well as morphisms of fibrations. I shall also present a characterization theorem for essential geometric morphisms and locally connected morphisms in terms of continuous functors, and a topos-theoretic interpretation of (a relative version) of the comprehensive factorization of a functor.

In the third part, I shall present a theorem providing necessary and sufficient explicit conditions for a morphism of sites to induce an equivalence of toposes; this generalizes Grothendieck’s Comparison Lemma. Lastly, I shall give an overview of results characterizing important properties of geometric morphisms of toposes (such as being an inclusion, a surjection, hyperconnected, localic, local etc.) in terms of properties of morphisms or comorphisms of sites.

This material is taken from the monograph draft https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08737.pdf

For more information, in particular about registration, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/toposeslectures/home  

I am happy to announce that Joshua Wrigley has just been admitted to the Ph.D. at the University of Insubria under my supervision, ranking first in the Ph.D. competition and obtaining a Huawei studentship (as part of the recently funded project Grothendieck toposes for information and computation). Joshua comes from the University of Oxford, where he has obtained his Bachelor and Master degrees with honours.

Joshua joins the other two Ph.D. students of the group, Morgan Rogers (who came from the University of Cambridge in 2018) and Riccardo Zanfa (who came from the University of Milan in 2018). Congratulations to him!