For the next 6 weeks I'm meeting with Kris Brown, Nate Osgood, Xiaoyan Li, William Waites and Evan Patterson to design software for epidemiological modeling. And we're meeting in Maxwell's childhood home in Edinburgh! It's been made into a little museum, and this plaque is inside.
It sets a high standard for what counts as doing good science. And the coffee packets in the kitchen are all the same brand: Maxwell House.
@johncarlosbaez Someone should add a plaque which expresses Maxwell's equations as a Yang-Mills theory (after all it was the motivation for Yang-Mills)[dA=0,~\ast d\ast A = J]In this case, if we want to recover Maxwell's equations, then we should take (A) to be a connection on a line bundle over (\mathbb{R}^4) and equip (\mathbb{R}^4) with the Lorentz metric?
@Diffgeometer1 - yes, that's how you get Maxwell's equations from Yang-Mills theory, and this slick version of the equations is on the floor in the school of physics at the University of Edinburgh!
We can also go back in time and look at Maxwell's original 20 equations, written here using the vector notation introduced only later by Heaviside and Gibbs:
@johncarlosbaez in case anyone else finds this useful, here's a link to all 8 of jcb's blog posts on agent based models, plus a few prior (also interesting) posts on math and climate change. enjoy! https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/?s=agent+based+models
@tbrunner - no, stock and flow models are not Petri nets. I've done a lot of work on Petri nets and if they could subsume stock and flow models I would have accomplished that. Neither sort of model has the other as a special case.
@johncarlosbaez Now I know for sure that the way I spent my youth was hopelessly inadequate!
I am so jealous.
My physics prof told us that Maxwell actually wrote down his equations after an argument with his wife, while staying on the couch at a friend's house! I'm not sure he's correct, but it was a good story 😁
@johncarlosbaez I liked The Man Who Changed Everything by Basil Mahon, and then although not a biography, The Maxwellians by Bruce Hunt. Maxwell seemed like the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with.
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