Categories for the Working Mathematician

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• ihm · Jan 5, 2015 · Recommends

  Lawvere and Schanuel's excellent "Conceptual Mathematics" has plenty of exercises, and the book is insanely approachable while still teaching a good amount (it's chock full of examples). Mac Lane (Categories for the Working Mathematician) also has exercises and I think the ones from the first few chapters aren't so hard.

  on “Introduction to Category Theory” ↗
• tel · Feb 25, 2015 · Recommends

  In my experience if you have or are willing to invest on the side to gain the necessary abstract algebra background then MacLane's Categories for the Working Mathematician is the go to source. It is certainly "for the Working Mathematician", so don't make bones about that, but to not include it in a reading list is criminal. If nothing else, buy it and keep rereading it…

  on “Category Theory Reading Lists” ↗
• defined · Apr 27, 2017 · Recommends

  Honestly, Saunders MacLane's book, "Categories for the Working Mathematician", was very useful for this non-mathematician. It was surprisingly accessible if I started at the introduction and did not move forward until I grokked the content. I won't pretend I absorbed all (or…

  on “Category Theory, Syntactically (2016)” ↗
• l332mn · Sep 2, 2021 · Recommends

  As a mathematician, I can't recommend "Categories for the Working Mathematician" enough, written by the (co)creator of category theory himself.

  on “Ask HN: Source Recommendations for Category Theory?” ↗
• tkgally · Mar 4, 2021 · Mentions

  …ago. I got a master’s degree in math at the University of Chicago in 1980, Saunders Mac Lane was on the faculty, a few grad students were doing category theory, and I worked through part of Mac Lane’s Categories for the Working Mathematician on my own. I left mathematics soon after—with some regret—and haven’t kept up with the field. The interview with Emily Riehl and the introduction (which I read just now) to her book Category Theory in…

  on “Emily Riehl is rewriting the foundations of higher category theory” ↗
• patrickthebold · Jun 20, 2021 · Mentions

  Without the 'what's the problem', It's in 'categories for the working mathematician' by Saunders Mac Lane. Of course, it's entirely seriously in that book.

  on “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)” ↗
• silentbicycle · Nov 15, 2010 · Mentions

  ...which is in turn a nod to _Categories for the Working Mathematician_ by Saunders Mac Lane (as is Clocksin's _Clause and Effect: Prolog Programming for the Working Programmer_, and probably several other books.)

  on “Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer” ↗
• JadeNB · Dec 13, 2014 · Mentions

  > To actually learn it, Mac Lane & Saunders "Categories for the Working Mathematician." seems to enjoy continued popularity. By the way, it's not two authors; the single author's name is "Saunders Mac Lane".

  on “A concise introduction to category theory” ↗
• Tom_Leinster · Jan 3, 2017 · Mentions

  …little background" are too vague. What I had in mind was that the book requires little background relative to many other introductions to category theory (such as the grand-daddy of them all, Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician). But I should have been more specific. If update the arXiv submission, I'll fix that. As cokernel points out, the level of knowledge assumed is roughly what you'd get from an undergraduate mathematics…

  on “Basic Category Theory” ↗
• mikorym · Nov 9, 2019 · Mentions

  …group by its permutation group as a habit or not, they may be isomorphic, but they are constructed differently—as are mathematicians. [1] This was his joking way to refer to Algebra (old testament) and Categories for the Working Mathematician (new tastament).

  on “Math Looks the Same in the Brains of Boys and Girls, Study Finds” ↗
• WoahNoun · Jun 7, 2022 · Mentions

  This is a famous quote from the first real book on category theory. "Categories for the Working Mathematician" by Saunders Mac Lane.

  on “The Lazy Monad” ↗
• synetic · Jul 10, 2023 · Mentions

  …graduate level. Eventually there may be a spillover into other areas like computer science where so called practical uses occur. But maybe not. It’s still too early to say. There’s a famous book called Categories for the Working Mathematician. Maybe someday there will be a book called Categories for the Working Programmer. I like that you call it the string theory of math. It’s a more modern way of saying “abstract nonsense”.

  on “Polynomial Functors: A Mathematical Theory of Interaction [pdf]” ↗
• theoh · Oct 22, 2018 · Critical

  …they're brilliant, but compared to what standard? Sometimes it feels as if the people who blithely link to these resources are indifferent to whether the teaching is good or bad. Even Mac Lane's book "Categories for the Working Mathematician" has been credibly criticised for being poorly written—but because it's so famous/prestigious it still gets loads of five-star reviews. Personally, I'd recommend Categories and Computer Science by RFC…

  on “An invitation to category theory” ↗
• anonymouz · Dec 11, 2014 · Mentions

  …introduction. It's more of a reference. I'd dare say the Wikipedia entry on category theory (and related links) makes a better introduction for the uninitiated. To actually learn it, Mac Lane & Saunders "Categories for the Working Mathematician." seems to enjoy continued popularity.

  on “A concise introduction to category theory” ↗
• drcomputer · Dec 11, 2014 · Mentions

  > To actually learn it, Mac Lane & Saunders "Categories for the Working Mathematician." seems to enjoy continued popularity. This is the best way I've found so far, and I had been semi-supplementing with MacLane and Birkhoff's "Algebra", just to get a feeling for the vocabulary; bringing…

  on “A concise introduction to category theory” ↗

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