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)”

Posets inside of categories

A poset can be thought of as a category with the property that each hom-set is either empty or singleton (technically that’s a preorder, but I’ll skip that for now). There’s also a category of posets. In my work lately, I’ve actually wanted to point at an object in a category and say “this oneContinueContinue reading “Posets inside of categories”

Adjoint School 2023

Category theory has been “applied” in one sense or another since the beginning. Eilenberg himself studied automata theory. But the applied category theory community as it currently exists formally coalesced in 2018. All at once, we had the first instance of the Applied Category Theory conference, the accompanying Adjoint School, and the announcement of theContinueContinue reading “Adjoint School 2023”