Michi’s blog » archive for 'Category theory'

• May 15th, 2014
• 3:27 am

I’ve been talking with some topologists lately, and seen interesting constructions. I think these may potentially have some use in understanding Haskell or monads.

Simplicial objects

A simplicial object in a category is a collection of objects $C_n$ together with n maps $d_j:C_n\to C_{n-1}$ and n maps $s_j:C_n\to C_{n+1}$ subject to a particular collection of axioms.

The axioms are modeled on the prototypical simplicial structure: if $C_n$ is taken to be a (weakly) increasing list of integers, $d_j$ skips the $j$th entry, and $s_j$ repeats the $j$th entry. For the exact relations, I refer you to Wikipedia.

Classifying spaces

Take a category C. We can build a simplicial object $C_*$ from C by the following construction:

$C_n$ is all sequences $c_0\xrightarrow{f_0}c_1\xrightarrow{f_1}\dots\xrightarrow{f_{n-1}}c_n$ of composable morphisms in $C$.
$d_j$ composes the $j$th and $j+1$st morphisms. $d_0$ drops the first morphism and $d_n$ drops the last morphism.
$s_j$ inserts the identity map at the $j$th spot.

## Species, derivatives of types and Gröbner bases for operads

• December 18th, 2010
• 2:05 am

This is a typed up copy of my lecture notes from the combinatorics seminar at KTH, 2010-09-01. This is not a perfect copy of what was said at the seminar, rather a starting point from which the talk grew.

In some points, I’ve tried to fill in the most sketchy and un-articulated points with some simile of what I ended up actually saying.

Combinatorial species started out as a theory to deal with enumerative combinatorics, by providing a toolset & calculus for formal power series. (see Bergeron-Labelle-Leroux and Joyal)

As it turns out, not only is species useful for manipulating generating functions, btu it provides this with a categorical approach that may be transplanted into other areas.

For the benefit of the entire audience, I shall introduce some definitions.

Definition: A category C is a collection of objects and arrows with each arrow assigned a source and target object, such that

## [Stanford] MATH 198: Category Theory and Functional Programming

• August 29th, 2009
• 7:19 am

Category theory, with an origin in algebra and topology, has found use in recent decades for computer science and logic applications. Possibly most clearly, this is seen in the design of the programming language Haskell – where the categorical paradigm suffuses the language design, and gives rise to several of the language constructs, most prominently the Monad.

In this course, we will teach category theory from first principles with an eye towards its applications to and correspondences with Haskell and the theory of functional programming. We expect students to previously or currently be taking CS242 and to have some level of mathematical maturity. We also expect students to have had contact with linear algebra and discrete mathematics in order to follow the motivating examples behind the theory expounded.

Wednesdays at 4.15.

• July 22nd, 2009
• 3:28 pm

Dear blogosphere,

come this fall, I shall be teaching. My first lecture course, ever.

The subject shall be on introducing Category Theory from the bottom up, in a manner digestible for Computer Science Undergraduates who have seen Haskell and been left wanting more from that contact.

And thus comes my question to you all: what would you like to see in such a course? Is there any advice you want to give me on how to make the course awesome?

The obvious bits are obvious. I shall have to discuss categories, functors, (co)products, (co)limits, monads, monoids, adjoints, natural transformations, the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the Hom-Tensor adjunction, categorical interpretation of data types. And all of it with explicit reference to how all these things influence Haskell, as well as plenty of mathematical examples.

But what ideas can you give me to make this greater than I’d make it on my own?

## PROPs and patches

• February 15th, 2008
• 7:59 pm

Brent Yorgey wrote a post on using category theory to formalize patch theory. In the middle of it, he talks about the need to commute a patch to the end of a patch series, in order to apply a patch undoing it. He suggests a necessary condition to do this is that, given patches P and Q, we need to be able to find patches Q’ and P’ such that PQ=Q’P’, and preferably such that Q’ and P’ capture some of the info in P and Q.

However, as such, this is not enough to solve the issue. For one thing, we can set Q’=P and P’=Q, and things are the way he asks for.

Now, I wonder whether we can solve this by using PROPs (or possibly di-operads or something like that). Let’s represent a document as a list of some sort of tokens. We’ll set the set of all lists of length , and we’ll set to denote operations that take a list of length n and returns a list of length m.