Re: patenting colimits?

[mjhealy@ece.unm.edu]

Dear Michael and all,

I am unaware of a great deal of the history of category theory in grant
funding.  The NSF declaration is troubling, especially since my colleagues
and I so far have had our category-theoretic proposals in cognitive
neuroscience rejected.  Some of the reviewers, though, did seem to find
favor with our use of category theory in relation to their subject; the
problem seems to have been more in other areas.  We haven't given up!

I regret not joining the FMCS crowd at UBC.  Too much work has resulted
from a prior commitment.

Best regards,
Mike

> 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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>




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