Top all-time · #1833
Tai-Danae Bradley
Personal blog · math3ma.com/blogmathscience
Tai-Danae Bradley writes Math3ma, a personal blog at math3ma.com about math and science. Since 2017, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 51 times, most often “Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Tai-Danae Bradley's blog on category theory, matrices as graphs and tensor diagrams, and quantum probability. HN readers value its intuitive, unconventional exposition that explains ideas in plain terms.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called her work pretty cool and her applied category theory paper the clearest treatment; the blog is called excellent; its unconventional, reader-addressing st
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Math3ma is a blog about mathematics, maintained by Tai-Danae Bradley.
Most-linked posts?
- Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-05-16
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-12-25
- Viewing Matrices and Probability as Graphs5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-03-06
- A First Look at Quantum Probability, Part 14 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-20
- The Tensor Product, Demystified3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-19
- What's Category Theory Anyway?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-22
- The Yoneda Lemma2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-04-21
- The Fibonacci Sequence as a Functor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-15
- A New Perspective of Entropy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-22
- Understanding Entanglement with SVD2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-07
What Hacker News says?
As a Mathematician who worked in Theoretical Physics for a bit, I'm happy to hear that there's people out there interested in the area. Maths often get a bad rep, but at their core they are probably the most interesting thing to learn, on par with music in my opinion. I encourage anyone interested in Mathematics (regardless of your level) to check out Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. I know it's technically a ph…
Comment linking /
on “Relearning math as an adult”Submitted Viewing Matrices and Probability as Graphs as a story · 245 points
HN discussionThe parent didn't say category theory is necessary to conducting ML research, just that it could be useful. This point isn't particularly controversial. If you're interested in this niche of the field, I find Tai-Danae Bradley's work to be pretty cool! She has a site: https://www.math3ma.com/
Comment linking /
on “Mathematical Introduction to Deep Learning: Methods, Implementations, and Theory”Submitted Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams as a story · 225 points
HN discussionThe clearest and most concise treatment I've come across on how Category Theory is used is Tai-Danae Bradley's "What is Applied Category Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05923 (It's a 50 page PDF) Unfortunately the examples aren't within CS, but at least for me personally, seeing it clearly applied in any context was the most important thing. It may be a good pre-req for looking at (or conjuring up your own) more…
Comment linking /
on “Category Theory for Programmers (2014) [pdf]”Submitted Entropy and Algebra and Topology = ? as a story · 104 points
HN discussionShe has written introductory blog posts on CT as well: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway
Comment linking /blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway
on “An invitation to category theory”Submitted The Fibonacci Sequence as a Functor as a story · 63 points
HN discussionIt depends on what you are looking for. Tensors as in physics (typically with each dimension being related to space(time)), tensors for quantum information & computing, tensors for deep learning? I've found it illuminating to see tensor diagrams. - https://medium.com/@pmigdal/in-the-topic-of-diagrams-i-did-w... - https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diag... Also, right now, we are developing a mat…
Comment linking /blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diagrams
on “A Graph of Related Subreddits”Submitted Commutative Diagrams Explained as a story · 5 points
HN discussionFor those interested in these kinds of interractive math experiences, I have been keeping track of them for a while. Here is my list so far: • https://www.intmath.com/ - Interactive Mathematics Learn math while you play with it • http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ - up and down the ladder of abstraction • https://betterexplained.com/ - Intuitive guides to various things in math • https://www.math3ma.com/blog…
Comment linking /blog/matrices-probability-graphs
on “Interactive Linear Algebra (2019)”Submitted Understanding Entanglement with SVD as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've always found the bipartite graph conceptualization of matrix multiplication the most intuitive, and especially so if you're familiar with neural networks: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-probability-graphs
Comment linking /blog/matrices-probability-graphs
on “A Programmer’s Intuition for Matrix Multiplication”Submitted The Tensor Product, Demystified as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm not a natural mathematician (emphatically not!) and pretty much every attempt I've made to wrap my head around Category Theory has foundered on an onslaught of formalism by paragraph 2. To be clear, I'm not knoocking that: for those who can and do grok things from that sort of treatment, all power to your elbow (and no small amount of admiration). But it's not how my brain works. I need an intuitive understandin…
Comment linking /blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway
on “What Is Applied Category Theory? (2018)”Submitted Multiplying Non-Numbers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs a high schooler interested in things that are probably out of my league, I love reading this kind of stuff. The author mentions their unconventional style at the beginning: hyperlinks, color, italics, exclamations, parentheses, side notes, etc. They address your thoughts and craft their explanations around them instead of being terse and optimizing for length. The author's blog [1] has more of this style and has…
Comment linking /
on “What Is Applied Category Theory? (2018)”Submitted Understanding Entanglement with SVD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf the author’s name sounds familiar despite you not being in this field: she is writing the excellent blog at https://www.math3ma.com and you might know her from there. Articles of this blog are submitted here from time to time.
Comment linking /
on “What Is Applied Category Theory? (2018)”Submitted A First Look at Quantum Probability, Part 1 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIn this line - I enjoyed playing Euclidea ( https://www.euclidea.xyz/ ) a minimalistic game on Euclidean geometry. The specification of geometry looks similar to the one from the game. ... Side note: when I hear "Penrose diagrams" I have in mind Penrose tensor notation, as in https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diag... .
Comment linking /blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diagrams
on “Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams”Submitted Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of this research: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/language-statistics-category-th...
Comment linking /blog/language-statistics-category-theory-part-3
on “Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test”Submitted The tensor product, demystified (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm starting to dive into the Path Integral formulation and this is taking me to turn things upside-down from what I thought of the order of what relies on what. I've started to get Baez's view [1] and given that, the question in [2] becames more and more important. But it's never too late to learn. An important element is to search the simplest cases posible, discrete better than continuous, finite beter than count…
Comment linking /blog/matrices-probability-graphs
on “What Richard Feynman’s PhD Thesis Looks Like: A Video Introduction (2020)”Submitted Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGreat textbook, I learned all the topology I know from it. Previously, Category Theory was taught as a field that connects branches of math, and thus in terms of other concepts. But recently there's a movement to view Category Theory as the definitive underlying field of math (instead of set theory), and teach different fields of math in terms of Category Theory rather than vice versa (a new-new math in a sense). I…
Comment linking /
on “Topology, a Categorical Approach (2020)”Submitted A New Perspective of Entropy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you'd like an intuitive introduction to the actual technical details of quantum probability: https://www.math3ma.com/blog/a-first-look-at-quantum-probabi...
Comment linking /blog/a-first-look-at-quantum-probability-part-1
on “Where Quantum Probability Comes From”Submitted A New Perspective of Entropy as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
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