Re: The Wikibook on Category Theory

[Andrew Salch <asalch@math.jhu.edu>]

I have found nLab very helpful as well, for when I need to look up a 
definition of some higher-categorical construction and I don't have a book 
or paper on hand to refer to. I have thought many times, though, that it 
would be great if there were some Web-accessible database of categories 
which are commonly encountered in mathematics, and their properties; I 
often find that I need to know if certain kinds of limits, or colimits, or 
injective envelopes, etc. etc. etc. exist in a particular category, and 
having some central database to look at (which would hopefully tell me 
what I need to know as well as cite whatever paper the result was proved 
in) would be a lot quicker than having to either search the literature for 
such a result or try to re-prove the result myself. Does anyone know if 
there have been any attempts to compile such a database?

Thanks,
Andrew S.


On Tue, 18 Aug 2009, Michael Shulman wrote:

> I love the nLab too, but I'm not sure that "merging" is the right
> word; probably the two are serving slightly different purposes.  The
> overall nLab is not really organized like a textbook or designed to be
> read linearly; writing a textbook requires additional thought.  But
> there is certainly no reason why the two can't share material and link
> to each other as appropriate.  And/or one could choose to write a
> textbook as a section of the nLab rather than on Wikibooks (if, for
> instance, one preferred its offerings in the way of mathematical
> typesetting).
>
> Mike
>

[For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]