From Category Theory to the Large Hadron Collider....and beyond.

Category theory is a framework that unifies all of mathematics in an abstract and homogeneous language by extracting the essence of mathematical structures. The Inaugural Lecture of Professor Christian Saemann will explain why this is an important tool in the generalisation of existing mathematical objects, a problem often faced in modern theoretical physics.
This is particularly true in string theory, a coherent framework of ideas that helps us think about quantum field theory, not unlike the way category theory helps us think about mathematics. It is therefore not surprising that highly abstract category theoretical methods prove to be useful in the description of quantum field theoretic quantities as, for example, in the particle scattering amplitudes measured at the Large Hadron Collider.
Professor Saemann’s lecture will demonstrate how his research is going from category theory to the Large Hadron Collider....and beyond.

Christian Saemann is a Professor of Mathematical Physics at Heriot-Watt University. His current research is in the application of modern mathematical methods, such as higher category theory and homotopical algebra, in theoretical physics, particularly in quantum field and string theory.