Understanding Yoneda lemma

The Yoneda Lemma The Yoneda lemma has been being complainted as “hard to understand” for a long time. Indeed it is not very easy, so I was trying to come up with a way to understand it more intuitively. Everyone knows the analogy by Ravi Vakil: You work at a particle accelerator. You want to understand some particle. All you can do are throw other particles at it and see what happens. If you understand how your mystery particle responds to all possible test particles at all possible test energies, then you know everything there is to know about your mystery particle. ...

June 3, 2026 · updated June 11, 2026 · 3 min ·  mathematics

The H+ doner and acceptor analogy in universal coefficient theorem for homology

Using fields to detect integral homology? So in the universal coefficient theorem, by taking $R = \mathbb{Z}$, we know that there is a short exact sequence (which splits): $0 \rightarrow H_n(C_{*}) \otimes_R M \rightarrow H_n(C_{*} \otimes_R M) \rightarrow Tor^R_1(H_{n-1}(C_*), M) \rightarrow 0$ Some interesting cases are when $M = \mathbb{Z}_{p} \text{ or } \mathbb{Q}$ , do the homology over $\mathbb{Q}$ and $\mathbb{Z}_p$ tells us something about the integral homology? In particular, if $\tilde{H}(X; \mathbb{Q}) = 0$ and $\tilde{H}(X; \mathbb{Z}_p) = 0$ for all $p$, does it imply that $\tilde{H}(X) = 0$ ? .This is a problem suggested in [Kup2020]1. ...

October 24, 2025 · updated October 24, 2025 · 3 min ·  mathematics

A more intuitive explanation of Burnside's lemma

Warning ...

April 10, 2025 · updated April 10, 2025 · 5 min ·  mathematics