Professor McLarty, please tell myself and the audience about your journey into math, how you

arrived at where you are now, especially how you became interested in Alexander Grothendieck.

Well, I mean, I guess a journey into math starts when I was like a 13-year-old.

My grandmother gave me the universe in Dr. Einstein.

By Lincoln Barnett.

He was a time magazine writer, wrote about relativity.

It was terrific.

So I went off to college to become a physicist because that's, that was the cool thing to do. But then, but then I got this quantum mechanics course and we, and we made all these graphical solutions.

We didn't really do it mathematically.

And I took a course from a logician philosopher Howard Stein on philosophy of math and one on Gittles' theorem, and I just thought, that's what I want to do.

So that's what I did.

Yes. At what point was it that you took quantum mechanics?

As an undergrad, junior. I see. And then you learned logic at what point?

Well, I was starting that same year, and I thought, you know what, I'm not going to switch to a

philosophy major, because I won't get math in grad school and philosophy. going to switch to a philosophy major. Well, because I won't get math

in grad school and philosophy. I'll switch to a math major, majored in math, to go into philosophy

so that then I would know some math when I was in philosophy. So I like that. You'll see a lot of

spring of airlock yellow behind me. Yes. Yes. Then how did your interest in

Alexander Growth in Deke develop? Oh, well, I had good fortune to know a great teacher of

mine who did category theory, and he spent a lot of time with the category theorists up in Montreal,

Mike Barr, Marta Bunga, Gonzalo Reyes, Andres, Andres,

André Joel. And so because I had this personal connection, I learned some category theory,

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