Here’s a video of a talk I gave yesterday, made by Brendan Fong. You can see the slides here—and then click the items in blue, and the pictures, for more information!

The idea: nature and the world of human technology are full of networks! People like to draw diagrams of networks. Mathematical physicists know that in principle these diagrams can be understood using category theory. But why should physicists have all the fun? This is the century of understanding living systems and adapting to life on a finite planet. Math isn’t the main thing we need for this, but it’s got to be part of the solution… so one thing we should do is develop a unified and powerful theory of networks.

We are still far from doing this. In this overview, I briefly described three parts of the jigsaw puzzle, and invited everyone to help fit them together:

• electrical circuits and signal-flow graphs.

• stochastic Petri nets, chemical reaction networks and Feynman diagrams.

• Bayesian networks, information and entropy.

In my talks coming up, I’ll go into more detail on each of these. With luck, you’ll be able to see videos here.

But if you’re near Oxford, you might as well actually attend! You can see dates, times, locations, my slides, and the talks themselves as they show up by going here.