Most scientific & mathematical disciplines I know of have results that educated outsiders can appreciate and go "wow" after a brief acquaintance, even without understanding the details. Does anyone know of such a result for category theory?
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
I've been searching for such a thing for a long time, and it's nice to see the responses here. But I'd ask for something similar for Group Theory. What is your "Brief, nice thing that makes people go Wow!" for Group Theory?
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Replying to @ColinTheMathmo
I'm not a group theorist, nor a mathematician, so I'm the wrong person to ask. I do find the Solovay-Kitaev thm wonderful: informally, if you take products of elements in (many) compact Lie groups, they fill in the group exponentially quickly, & surprisingly near to uniformly
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
That is a lovely result, but I was hoping for something more accessible and elementary, something I can explain - at least in outline - to high school students. Why is Group Theory "A Thing(tm)"? Why is it interesting, useful, and how does it tell us new things?
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An approach I like is to start with a problem that doesn't involve group theory, and show how it almost forces you to discover group theory. I don't know of such a problem (but then, I've never thought much about group theory!)
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