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.
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 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.
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!
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.
Neat! Great tip.