Category Theory 1.1: Motivation and Philosophy

What people said

phekunde · 2020-05 · Strong recommendation

If you are coming from imperative land (more specifically C++) then nothing beats articles and videos by Dr. Bartosz Milewski: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]

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defaultcompany · 2019-10 · Strong recommendation

This reminds me of a great talk by Bartosz Milewski [1] about the motivation and philosophy behind category theory. He makes the observation that our "monkey brains" are not good at dealing with complexity at all and we only really have one good strategy for dealing with it, that being to chop up complex problems into smaller, simpler problems which we can solve in isolation and then combine the results back together to approximate a solution to the larger problem. His point is that we do this everywhere and therefore it's no wonder that category theory is able to describe so many disparate areas of mathematics - because it's really describing just this mechanism, not some deep truth about the universe itself. Like - what if we as humans are so "register bound" that we can't solve any problems which can't be chopped up and put back together like this - such as those in the social sciences. His presentation style is wonderful - i recommend the whole talk but this part starts at 37:20. [1]: [VIDEO]

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OracB7 · 2022-08 · Recommendation

Eugenia Cheng has some interesting and accessible videos, e.g.: [LINK] and in a similar vein I am enjoying her book: "How to Bake Pi". Getting more into the technical side of things, Bartosz Milewski has good lessons in this playlist: [VIDEO]

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