Nick Gurski, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, co-wrote a piece titled “Topological Invariants from Higher Categories” for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Gurski’s co-authors were Niles Johnson, an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Ohio State University, and Angelica M. Osorno, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Reed College.
The Notices of the American Mathematical Society is the largest and most widely distributed mathematical periodical, and covers all aspects of modern mathematics.
The article is a survey of Gurski’s joint research project studying the Stable Homotopy Hypothesis, a mathematical statement that uses ideas from the well-established field of algebraic topology to inspire definitions and motivate lines of research in the much newer field of higher dimensional category theory. This hypothesis and other related guiding principles have breathed new life into applications in theoretical physics and even show promise in mathematical approaches to linguistics.