Category Archives: engineering

Teaching category theory to engineers (part 4)

I’ll start off with a clarification. My students are engineers in the sense that they are PhD students and postdoc in control theory. So they’re very well acquainted with certain sections of modern mathematics: dynamical systems, optimization, some differential geometry, but not so much abstract algebra. The experience with linear algebra is interesting, because itContinueContinue reading “Teaching category theory to engineers (part 4)”

Teaching category theory to engineers (part 3)

I have heard the requests to start posting lecture notes. I’ll get to it soon. These posts are my reflections on the experience of putting this course together and how the students respond. I’ve committed one of the cardinal sins of teaching category theory. I never mentioned the fact that the naming convention for categoriesContinueContinue reading “Teaching category theory to engineers (part 3)”

Teaching category theory to engineers (part 2)

Last time, I mentioned that I would have changed up how I presented the initial information. A few people couldn’t make it to the first lecture. So I offered to show up an hour early this week and essentially give the first lecture again. As you might expect, the second time around was much better!ContinueContinue reading “Teaching category theory to engineers (part 2)”

We’re building a space robot

If you want to test out new control algorithms on a piece of machinery that costs billions of dollars, it’s probably a good idea to first test them out on machinery that only costs thousands of dollars first. My colleague Pedro Roque designed a robot for this purpose. The thing on top is a graspingContinueContinue reading “We’re building a space robot”

Teaching category theory to engineers (part 1)

I’m currently teaching an informal course in category theory at Caltech. As I’m currently writing, I’ve given one lecture so far. One of the goals here is to get them up to the point where they could *begin* to read current research in applied category theory. So I hope they could pick up a paperContinueContinue reading “Teaching category theory to engineers (part 1)”

Hawk-Dove game in Julia

Years ago, I would took a bunch of CS courses with C++ as the language of interest. One of the main projects I worked on completely outside of any course was an implementation of the Hawk-Dove game. I recently tried to find the files from this, and came up empty-handed. Instead of getting bummed thatContinueContinue reading “Hawk-Dove game in Julia”