UCalgary Peripatetic Seminar: Kate Ponto

The trace of a matrix does not seem like an operation that should be iterated, but if we step back and think of trace as an operation on endomorphisms (or almost endomorphisms) that is invariant under cyclic permutation this becomes more plausible. I’ll make sense of iterated traces in monoidal bicategories, describe independence of order for iterated traces, and connect this result to (disguised) examples that have appeared in the literature.