David Roberts
Home Page

This is the private area of David Roberts within the nLab.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

For my papers (including PhD thesis) please see here. This page is to gather more ephemeral things.

Talks

• Localisations of 2-categories - Australian category seminar, October 2011
• 2-covering spaces 2-covering spaces - 2009 Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, at the University of South Australia. 30 September 2009

Notes

• Theorem A for topological categories - this is a version of Quillen’s Theorem A for categories in $\mathrm{Top}$. As a corollary, with a condition on the unit map of the codomain we get that geometric realisation of an $𝒩$-equivalence is a homotopy equivalence.

Mathematical publishing

I have views about the current system of academic publishing, especially how it impacts mathematics. Two links of interest:

• The cost of knowledge (wiki) - a boycott of Elsevier

• Math2.0 - a forum on mathematical publishing and what can be done

I posted a lot of information about publishing on Google+ in the period February 2012 to May 2012. I have since removed my Google+ account, but you can access what I posted at thoughts on publishing?.

Random ideas

• Construction of an equivalence between crossed modules in finite groups, and crossed modules with finite homotopy groups. More generally, same thing with (finite groups) replaced with some sort of Serre class.
• The (n+1)-ary factorisation system on nCat
• The 2-connected cover of a 2-crossed complex