Topology, thermodynamics, and the secret unity of everything — told through the eyes of people (and one bear, and one cat) who are trying to figure out why the same mathematics keeps turning up in completely different places.
These stories follow a small cast of characters as they stumble across the connections between abstract mathematics and the physical world. They are not textbooks. They do not prove theorems. They are the conversations that happen before the theorems — the moment when someone notices that two things that look completely different are secretly the same, and cannot quite explain why yet.
The mathematics is real. The characters are not.
Written in the tradition of George Gamow’s Mr Tompkins series (1940–1967).
The Cast
Professor Vera Knot — A retired topologist, now loosely affiliated with no institution in particular. She carries a ball of string in her coat pocket.
Professor Otto Gibbs — A large brown bear. Retired statistical mechanician. He came to the framework by noticing that tropical matrix multiplication is exactly what you get when you take a partition function to its zero-temperature limit.
Dr. Felix — A cat. Theoretical physicist, specialist in representation theory. He appears in the middle of conversations, contributes one observation that reframes everything, and leaves before anyone has processed what he said.
Marina — A marine biologist turned biophysicist. She asks the Box question: yes, but does it actually work?
| Episode | Title | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| S00 | The Tetrahedron | Why four points in space contain all of chemistry |
| S01 | Professor Knot Visits the Enzyme | The ISA programme as a 1-cochain; catalysis as cohomology |
More episodes in preparation.