From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/4906 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Bob Coecke Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Tutorial: Categories for the practicing physicist Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 23:09:24 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: Reply-To: Bob Coecke NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1243483623 20919 80.91.229.12 (28 May 2009 04:07:03 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 04:07:03 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Thu May 28 06:07:01 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1M9WtR-0008C1-C0 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Thu, 28 May 2009 06:07:01 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1M9WJC-00011K-Q1 for categories-list@mta.ca; Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:34 -0300 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:4906 Archived-At: We have put a tutorial on symmetric monoidal categories on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.3010 Categories for the practising physicist (104 pages) Bob Coecke and Eric Oliver Paquette It is directed to physicists who unlike mathematical physicists, do not have a strong background in pure maths. The target audience are researchers in quantum foundations and quantum infomation. The main goal is to show that monoidal categories are a natural starting point to craft theories of physics, and that they are closely related to something physicists are very used to, namely Dirac notation. Some effort is made to unpack the definition of a symmetric monoidal category which given its `size', is just too much to grasp at once. On the other hand, there is a very clear physical intuition to monoidal categories which can be easily grasped by physicists or any other operational scientist. This tutorial starts from this operational intuition and gradually converts it on mathematical substance. As a consequence, the attempt to convey a story is more prominent than mathematical rigor. In our interaction with quantum foundationalists and quantum informaticians we noticed a great need for a tutorial of this nature. [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]