7
$\begingroup$

In an article by A. Borovik, “Is mathematics special?”, he talks about the fact that carrying is a cocycle. He then says

[A student] discovered that carry is doing what cocycles frequently do: they are responsible for break of symmetry.

I have never thought about cocycles in this way. In what sense are cocycles often breaking symmetry? Are there any other examples of this?

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ Why was this question deemed more appropriate for MO than Math SE? This is not by any means a strictly research-level question, but rather one about some intuition, and the topic is not highly specialized (we've had questions on group cohomology here). I'm just curious what reasoning stood behind that decision. $\endgroup$
    – Wojowu
    Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 13:37
  • $\begingroup$ @Wojowu I asked this on Stackexchange, but did not get an answer and was hoping to get one here. $\endgroup$
    – mosuem
    Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 19:03

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .