Jason (jcreed) wrote,
Jason
jcreed

Just skimming through all the statements (starting on page 11 or so) of the form
Category A is isomorphic to category Bop
in Very Basic Noncommutative Geometry (ahahahaha "very basic") is blowing my mind.

Okay first of all it gave me an answer to what noncommutative geometry is, which I never knew, though I'd heard about it a lot. There's a theorem, the Gelfand-Naimark theorem, that says that the category of every nice (i.e. locally compact hausdorff) topological space is equivalent to the dual of the category of some commutative algebraic gadgets (namely, C* algebras, which I don't really understand at all). But also there's lots of noncommutative C* algebras. What are the topological things that correspond to those? Welllll, not locally compact hausdorff topological spaces, that's for sure. They're all "commutative".

So noncommutative geometry seems to be just... the study of noncommutative C* algebras. But since Gelfand-Naimark is true, this is viewed as if it's the study of a "noncommutative" generalization of topological spaces.

---

Separately, a Lovecraftian shiver tickles my brain upon seeing
(affine schemes) = (commutative rings)op
on page 19, because, like, commutative rings are so garden variety I think I have a half-dozen growing in my backyard amongst the weeds, but schemes are naked gibbering madness that drive mathematicians crazy for their hubris, or so I hear.
Tags: duality, geometry, math, noncommutative, schemes
Subscribe

  • (no subject)

    Didn't sleep well. Long day of work. Dinner with akiva at hanamichi.

  • (no subject)

    K was going to do a thing for her dad's birthday, but scheduling kept slipping and slipping so I guess we're going to try doing it tomorrow instead.

  • (no subject)

    Had a pleasant lunch with paul and gabe back from working-at-facebook times. Discussed the important issues of the day, by which I mean video games…

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 9 comments