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Easy Category Theory Part I: The Basics

Chris McLeod on April 30, 2019

Category Theory may be important to learn as functional programming is coming back into the mainstream. If you a have a passion for discovering abs...
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Ken Bellows • Edited

Nice one! This is heavy stuff, and you weren't kidding about how abstract it is 😳 But I thought your examples at the end were super helpful for showing how it's deeply abstract nature leads to intense flexibility, such that you can represent about anything! I hope you write more about it 😁

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Chris McLeod

Thank you, there are limitless articles to be written! It underlies just about all math. Thank you for the encouragement, I might just start the isomorphism article right now...

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Tails128

Out of curiosity: How did you get started with the topic?
I didn't know it and it seems a lot interesting!

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Chris McLeod

I found the topic a long time ago when I was implementing tagging for a CMS. I was googling for design patterns for categories/tags and stumbled on to category theory. I read an introduction and was hooked as it claimed to be the mother of all abstraction. I started studying the topic using the book and videos linked in the article. I just read and re-read, watch, and re-watch until I'm less confused about each chapter haha.

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Prathyush • Edited

Do you have a link to this article? I'm thinking of implementing a tagging system myself and was thinking that tags themselves should be more like the tagged things, just like how you say a category could itself be an arrow.

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Prathyush

"Then assemble these possibilities into a well-defined set of ideas using mathematical concepts, language, and notation to form statements (axioms) that are taken to be true and built upon to form further axioms."

Think you should have said further *theorems there.