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From: "Zinovy Diskin" <zdiskin@cs.toronto.edu>
To: categories@mta.ca
Subject: Re: dagger vs involutive
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 14:37:30 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <E1HOkxh-0001OS-0E@mailserv.mta.ca> (raw)

On 3/5/07, tholen@mathstat.yorku.ca <tholen@mathstat.yorku.ca > wrote:
>
> Here is an outsider's view on the debate which is all about a
> formalistic (not to say meaningless) vs a meaningful name. There seem
> to be only very few occasions in mathematics when the formalistic name
> won, C*-algebras being a prominent example. In category theory, one is


why only few? Recall the Poisson bracket, or Dirac's delta-function, or
quaternions (though as a shorthand for 4D complex number it's probably more
meaningful than triples) or, say, derivative, which is a basic notion in
calculus yet is, in fact, quite a formalistic name.  If to talk about
general tendencies, then it seems the  winner would be a formalistic term
(unfortunately). Consider a competition between a meaningful  yet too long,
or hard to pronounce, or not smooth in some sense term and a meaningless yet
short and energetic term, who would win? Many attempts to make terminology
and notation in a particular domain entirely consistent failed as soon as
they went beyond some reasonable level of consistency.
Zinovy Diskin

And aren't left-right adjoints, vertical-horizontal morphisms in fibrations
of purely typographical ("blackboardial") origin?




reminded of the hot debate of triples vs monads of the 60s and 70s. I
> guess that at the time of the "Zurich triple book" (SLNM 80) most
> people would have predicted that triples had already won the race. Mac
> Lane's book CWM appeared only 2 or 3 years later, after a vast amount
> of literature on triples. But he consistently used the meaningful name
> monad, even though (as far as I know) he had never directly published
> on the subject. You be the judge who won!
>
> Walter Tholen.
>
>
>



             reply	other threads:[~2007-03-06 19:37 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2007-03-06 19:37 Zinovy Diskin [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2007-03-07 15:13 Paul B Levy
2007-03-05 23:06 Prof. Peter Johnstone
2007-03-05 22:19 Eduardo Dubuc
2007-03-05 12:38 tholen

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