51–60 of 92 posts
I enjoy "Make Category Theory Intuitive!" (2007), by Jocelyn Ireson-Paine http://www.j-paine.org/make_category_theory_intuitive.html
If I may ask, why is the HN community so interested in this particular topic? I studied Math and have basic understanding of Category Theory... could someone point me to a text relating Categories and... something related to computers? What am I missing?
"for readers with relatively little mathematical background." A well put together guide, but note that 'relatively little' here means you're OK with some abstract algebra, at least, as the second example of the introduction begins: This example involves rings, which in this book are always taken to have a multiplicative identity, called 1. Similarly, homomorphisms of rings are understood to preserve multiplicative id…
Why do mathematicians use phrases such as "relatively little mathematical background" or "introduction to.." when they assume previous knowledge? I find that really annoying and a turn off from reading most math textbooks that are suppose to be "introductions". Is there an actual good book on category theory for someone that didn't complete a math degree? Additionally, what are applications of category theory to comp…
In math many "general topics" like calculus, linear algebra, probability etc are sometimes studied a few times (eg the second course in calculus might start from scratch and carefully construct the real numbers, which the first course skipped), and I've noticed some authors use "Introduction to X" to mean "this textbook is meant to be a first course in X"
If I may ask, why is the HN community so interested in this particular topic? I studied Math and have basic understanding of Category Theory... could someone point me to a text relating Categories and... something related to computers? What am I missing?
If I may ask, why is the HN community so interested in this particular topic? I studied Math and have basic understanding of Category Theory... could someone point me to a text relating Categories and... something related to computers? What am I missing?
Yeah, I also have a mathematics degree and don't really get the fascination that computer people have with category theory. I have never been particularly impressed with their claims of applicability. It seems to just complicate things for very little benefit. It's a pretty abstraction, but I don't see actual results from it. People use ugly, practical things like git, not beautiful categorical abstractions like piju…
This is a curse which keeps affecting large groups of programmers, to read about some pretty looking abstraction and then wanting to use it everywhere regardless if it is suitable or not. I'm thinking of Design Patterns, CQRS, complex microservice architectures etc.
If I may ask, why is the HN community so interested in this particular topic? I studied Math and have basic understanding of Category Theory... could someone point me to a text relating Categories and... something related to computers? What am I missing?
If I may ask, why is the HN community so interested in this particular topic? I studied Math and have basic understanding of Category Theory... could someone point me to a text relating Categories and... something related to computers? What am I missing?
This article definitely assumes more knowledge than basic abstract algebra - there are also some key facts used from set theory assumed (i.e. In a proof, it is assumed to be known that if a compositiom of two maps is the identity map on one set, and the reverse composition is the identity on the other set, then the map is a bijection - it also assumes knowledge from abstract algebra that the composition of two homomo…
> In a proof, it is assumed to be known that if a compositiom of two maps is the identity map on one set, and the reverse composition is the identity on the other set, This is something math and computer science students typically learn in the first two weeks in their mandatory math lectures at least at German universities