Dr Nicola Gambino (University of Leeds) gives a maths webinar for the School of Mathematics, UEA. The talk is on “Bicategories in algebra, logic and topology”.

To wacth the seminar online use the link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/b1e4b15763cd40aca501aba016afd537

The abstract is below.

Categories, consisting of objects and morphisms, provide a convenient way to organize, study and relate mathematical objects in a variety of disciplines. Yet, there are natural situations in which composition of morphisms fails to be associative and one needs to consider the more subtle notion of a bicategory. A fundamental example is the bicategory of rings and bimodules (with composition given by tensor product). This seminar will provide an introduction to bicategories, mostly focusing on examples, leading up to some recent work aimed at constructing Cartesian closed bicategories which are of interest in logic (via linear logic) and topology (via operads). No prior knowledge of category theory will be assumed.