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As math educators, we often wish out loud that our students were more excited about mathematics. I finally came across a video that indicates what such a world might be like:

A popular way to visualise relationships between some finite number of sets is via Venn diagrams, or more generally Euler diagrams. In these diagrams, a set is depicted as a two-dimensional shape such as a disk or a rectangle, and the various Boolean relationships between these sets (e.g., that one set is contained in another, or that the intersection of two of the sets is equal to a third) is represented by the Boolean algebra of these shapes; Venn diagrams correspond to the case where the sets are in “general position” in the sense that all non-trivial Boolean combinations of the sets are non-empty. For instance to depict the general situation of two sets ${A,B}$ together with their intersection ${A \cap B}$ and ${A \cup B}$ one might use a Venn diagram such as

(where we have given each region depicted a different color, and moved the edges of each region a little away from each other in order to make them all visible separately), but if one wanted to instead depict a situation in which the intersection ${A \cap B}$ was empty, one could use an Euler diagram such as

One can use the area of various regions in a Venn or Euler diagram as a heuristic proxy for the cardinality ${|A|}$ (or measure ${\mu(A)}$) of the set ${A}$ corresponding to such a region. For instance, the above Venn diagram can be used to intuitively justify the inclusion-exclusion formula

$\displaystyle |A \cup B| = |A| + |B| - |A \cap B|$

for finite sets ${A,B}$, while the above Euler diagram similarly justifies the special case

$\displaystyle |A \cup B| = |A| + |B|$

for finite disjoint sets ${A,B}$.

While Venn and Euler diagrams are traditionally two-dimensional in nature, there is nothing preventing one from using one-dimensional diagrams such as

or even three-dimensional diagrams such as this one from Wikipedia:

Of course, in such cases one would use length or volume as a heuristic proxy for cardinality or measure, rather than area.

With the addition of arrows, Venn and Euler diagrams can also accommodate (to some extent) functions between sets. Here for instance is a depiction of a function ${f: A \rightarrow B}$, the image ${f(A)}$ of that function, and the image ${f(A')}$ of some subset ${A'}$ of ${A}$:

Here one can illustrate surjectivity of ${f: A \rightarrow B}$ by having ${f(A)}$ fill out all of ${B}$; one can similarly illustrate injectivity of ${f}$ by giving ${f(A)}$ exactly the same shape (or at least the same area) as ${A}$. So here for instance might be how one would illustrate an injective function ${f: A \rightarrow B}$:

Cartesian product operations can be incorporated into these diagrams by appropriate combinations of one-dimensional and two-dimensional diagrams. Here for instance is a diagram that illustrates the identity ${(A \cup B) \times C = (A \times C) \cup (B \times C)}$:

In this blog post I would like to propose a similar family of diagrams to illustrate relationships between vector spaces (over a fixed base field ${k}$, such as the reals) or abelian groups, rather than sets. The categories of (${k}$-)vector spaces and abelian groups are quite similar in many ways; the former consists of modules over a base field ${k}$, while the latter consists of modules over the integers ${{\bf Z}}$; also, both categories are basic examples of abelian categories. The notion of a dimension in a vector space is analogous in many ways to that of cardinality of a set; see this previous post for an instance of this analogy (in the context of Shannon entropy). (UPDATE: I have learned that an essentially identical notation has also been proposed in an unpublished manuscript of Ravi Vakil.)