Are diagrams mathematically rigorous?

Yes. The diagrammatic language we use in this blog owes its mathematical rigour to the fact that any computation can be written as a series of function abstrations and applications.

Since all of the practically useful mathematical calculations that we typically talk about on this blog must ultimately be expressed in a computer, we can always find some diagrammatic description of the relevant mathematics that leverages the function abstractions.

References and further reading

Hardwick, Robert J. 2025. “Why no mathematical symbols?” umbralcalculations, November. https://umbralcalc.github.io/posts/why_no_mathematical_symbols.html.
Harel, David. 1988. “On Visual Formalisms.” Communications of the ACM 31 (5): 514–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/42411.42414.
Wikipedia contributors. n.d. “Lambda Calculus.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus.