12:20 AM
@RuneHaugseng i think i remember talking about this with mark behrens and some of his students (one of them was trying to line up the classical and \infty cases), you might try writing to him

@JonathanBeardsley I'd be willing to bet Ben Knudsen could point you to many such references

@MikeMiller great, i'm looking forward to it! i'm imagining/hoping that it'll be some sort of cross between fear & loathing and the big lebowski

12:48 AM
@ReubenStern this comes up in defining fukaya categories: depending on how much structure you can put on your lagrangians (orientation, etc.) you get to define a Z/n-graded chain complex (the hom-object) for varying values of n
i'm pretty sure you get d^2=0 even without any such structure, so you might hope to get a category enriched in differential modules (or really some flavor of A_\infty-category)

1:03 AM
Let $B_n^0$ be the kernel of the abelianization map of the braid group $B_n\to \mathbb{Z}$. Then the geometric realization of the groupoid $\coprod_{n>0} BB_n^0$ of classifying spaces has the homotopy type of $\Omega^2(S^3\langle 3\rangle)$, a double loop space. However, that groupoid is not braided monoidal (it's only monoidal, as far as I know). Anyone have an explanation for this?

13 hours later…
2:02 PM
http://www.rkursem.com/poll/view.php?id=cd9d896d35fb9a5a4
A poll where you can suggest and vote for, for what is, in your opinon, the most important papers in algebraic topology that has appeared on the arXiv during 2017 (that has appeared so far).

2 hours later…
4:04 PM
@JonathanBeardsley yeah, I didn't think about it that way; please free to remove the post...my apologies.

4:20 PM
@JonathanBeardsley there is a potential utilitarian calculus here. It could be argued that if the breakthrough prizes really "arrive" in the public consciousness, they could raise the profile of math enough to draw vastly more funding than their cost
I don't know how plausible that seems to me, but some rich and powerful people seem to want to make it happen, because there was a link to the breakthrough prizes from the main google search page the other day

i appreciate the enthusiasm that brought about a poll on important alg.top papers in 2017
however, i feel like taking a vote to rank-order them places a lot of value on just a few members of the community
and i'm not sure that's the type of thing that i'd like to encourage in our field

4:42 PM
That is a poll that seems strangely biased from the start.

4:53 PM
@JonathanBeardsley i don't know, but i would guess that that's less due to bias and more due to a desire to learn about more things that happened

5:08 PM
@TylerLawson Am I seeing the same poll everyone else is? It has Nikolaus-Scholze, a button that says Test, a button that says "delete this nephew," and then a space to write something in?
@SaulGlasman Yeah I considered this. I guess I feel like it seems pretty unlikely? But I'm not 100% certain about that.

There was also a Breakthrough "Junior" Prize :-)

2 hours later…
6:55 PM
The reason there are not any more papers on the poll is not meant to be biased, I was just lazy and took a paper I recalled was heavily starred on this webpage.The hope was that people would add some papers they thought were interesting. I did not mean it to be a serious ranking, more as a list of papers that people found particularily important this year.
It was not meant to be too serious. While I agree that it puts a lot of value on certain members of the community, I am not aware of a better forum than this one.

ok, here is a paper i found good and important this year, without ranking or such: Tyler's paper on BP