I'm so far from the right person to leave a remark on this it's not even funny, but it looks to me like someone noticed that category theoretic "arrow-chasing" diagrams for supersymmetry happen to look reminiscent of this West African artform. I brought a book on category theory ("Conceptual Mathematics") to a coffee group last week and someone there expressed a lack of interest in it because it seemed to him like "some kind of advanced geometry," which isn't it at all, but category theory relies quite heavily on this particular visual structure and I can see why someone glancing at the book would come away with that impression.

Adinkras are not Category Diagrams (among other things, if you have A->B and B->C you don't necessarily have A->C). Here's the original paper:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0408004v1.pdf

Urs Schreiber speculated a while ago that there may be a connection between adinkra diagrams and categories

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/08/adinkras.html

But to my knowledge, the connection has not been made explicit.

Thanks! I'm definitely out of my league here; I found the second blog article and went based on my glancing at that. IIRC the transitivity of the category diagram is of paramount importance, so I wouldn't think the analogy holds if transitivity doesn't.

Category theory is an interest of mine I hope to develop further but there's a lot of preliminary learning I need to do first.

Here's a talk by Gates where he explains it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6w0K5FIgsU

I think I've seen this before... I think the idea is, some transitions between particles (decay paths etc) don't work. The structure of the paths that are allowed match up with codes that are "correct" in an ECC algorithm. In ECC, if you get an invalid code, you can correct it to a valid code. I can't think what the physical analog would be - if a particular kind of transition happens, it gets "corrected" by the Universe to a valid one?