So8res comments on Book Review: Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists (MIRI course list) - Less Wrong

31 Post author: So8res 19 September 2013 03:06AM

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Comment author: tgb 20 September 2013 02:15:27PM 5 points [-]

Thanks for writing this review. Category theory keeps coming up slightly in my courses but I've never gotten a chance to really tackle it head-on so reviews like this are helpful.

I've had the book by David Spivak "Category Theory for Scientists" sitting around for a while that looks promising for a perhaps broader scope of people here.

John Baez (who sometimes comments here) and Mike Stay also have a delightful paper "Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone". It's not an introduction to category theory but it does not really expect much background. Yet it still manages to bring some really impressively diverse fields together in interesting ways. Unfortunately it's not quite deep enough to really do much with these connections other than give their general form. It's very readable and has such a breadth of subjects in it that it's pretty likely you'll find some of it interesting and it serves to give a pretty strong motivation for why category theory is worth learning.

Comment author: So8res 21 September 2013 02:45:31PM *  2 points [-]

Ha, small world. I actually ran into A Rosetta Stone a little while back when I was doing haskell & physics in my free time; I've skimmed it before. I'll have to go back and read it more closely now that I know the basics of Category Theory a little better.

Thanks for the tips!

Comment author: EvelynM 21 September 2013 04:31:48PM 2 points [-]

Category Theory for Scientists is available as Open Courseware from MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s996-category-theory-for-scientists-spring-2013/index.htm

The student examples of how to use Olog are worth reading, in addition to the lecture pdfs.

Comment author: tgb 21 September 2013 05:34:51PM 1 point [-]

Neat! Great tip.