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by kurotetsuka 4032 days ago
“Inter-universal Geometer" - This seems to refer to the Geometers from Neal Stephenson's Anathem[0], or is at least inspired by the same concept. "Inter-universal" probably refers to the fact that math, analogous to geometry, holds true regardless of the rules of one's universe. (Math is a set of "if these rules apply to a system, then these other rules must apply" statements.) Just seems a little weird to me that the article was so specific about so much, but left that bit ambiguous ("What does it mean? His website offers no clues.").

Edit - Did some digging, apparently his website offers direct clues:

> "inter-universal geometry", which may be thought of as a sort of generalization of anabelian geometry and, in particular, "absolute p-adic anabelian geometry"[1]

Idk what the "absolute p-adic" part means, but anabelian geometry is described here: [3].

Edit2 - Dunno why i'm spending so much time on this, but here's Mochizuki's explanation for the term (stolen from this wiki page on Inter-universal Teichmüller theory[4]).

> "in this sort of a situation, one must work with the Galois groups involved as abstract topological groups, which are not equipped with the 'labeling apparatus' . . . [defined as] the universe that gives rise to the model of set theory that underlies the codomain of the fiber functor determined by such a basepoint. It is for this reason that we refer to this aspect of the theory by the term 'inter-universal'."

So I guess that's your explanation?

[0] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

[1] :: http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/thoughts-english.h...

[3] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabelian_geometry

[4] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...