Re: patenting colimits?

[Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca>]

Interesting comments by Vaughan.  I have not looked at this patent and
have no intention of doing so.  But Charles and I, both in CTCS and in a
paper published in some CS conference proceedings exhibited things like
a sketch for trees of integers as a pushout or amalgamated sum of a sketch
for trees and that for integers by identifying the sort for integers in
the latter with the sort for leaves in the fomer.  I think we have a
triple amalgamation too, something like trees of lists of integers.  So
evidence of prior art certainly exists, if anyone cares.

On the other hand, I for one would welcome serious applications of
category theory in industry.  My former department is hiring in only three
areas: number theory (in which they are truly strong), applied math, and
statistics (in each of which I rather suspect they are truly weak since
they are competing with every g-d university in North America).  I would
just love to shove it in their collective faces that by allowing the
category theory group to wither, they have allowed an important applied
area to disappear.  But no, they would rather be in the rearguard than the
advanced guard.

Wouldn't it be nice to make the same point to NSF which announced
officially in 1993 that there would never again be any funding in category
theory?

Michael


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