Louis Kauffman

Thinking the Float Tank – Saturday, August 26, 2023 (Day 3)

Laws of Form and the Cheshire Cat

Speaker Bio:

Louis H Kauffman is Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was born in Potsdam, New York on 2/3/45 and grew up in Norfolk, New York. He graduated valedictorian from the Norwood-Norfolk High School in 1962, obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1966, obtained a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1972. He began teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and retired from UIC in 2017. He has had numerous visiting positions around the world. Kauffman is Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of the World Scientific Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications and Editor of the World Scientific Book Series on Knots and Everything. His research is devoted to topology and the theory of knots where he has discovered new connections between knot theory and statistical mechanics, new invariants of knots and links and new extensions of the field of knot theory. He works on the concepts of form and distinction, reference and self-reference and their relations with cybernetics and with human thought. Kauffman is the recipient of the Warren McCulloch Award and the Norbert Wiener Medal of the American Society for Cybernetics, Lester Ford and Paul Halmos writing awards from the Mathematical Society of America, served as Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Society of America, and he is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Abstract:

The Cheshire Cat is well known to disappear, leaving only a grin. In human thought the great universe of apparent distinctions disappears leaving only one mark, the empty set, or just emptiness, or perhaps a calculus of indications discovered by G. Spencer-Brown. This talk will, in the traditions of burlesque, show how this Spencer-Brown grin is left when one divests oneself of unnecessary distinctions. Analogies with the vanishing of the Cheshire Cat will be explored. Analogies with the vanishing of the Cheshire Cat will be vanished. What is not marked is unmarked.