RE: A well kept secret?

[jim stasheff <jds@math.upenn.edu>]

This seems like an excellent advertisement of `thinking categorically'
and not necessarily writing in that dialect.

jim
Larry Harper wrote:
> Dear All,
>
>
>
> As one of MacLane's working mathematicians who follows the catlist, I would
> like to add some thoughts about perceptions of category theory (CT). I
> earned a Bachelor's in Physics at Berkeley in 1960 and went to grad school
> in Mathematics at the University of Oregon the following fall. In Frank
> Anderson's graduate algebra course I was first exposed to CT and hated it.
> My background and ability in algebra were marginal anyway and to have my
> first definition of tensor product be in terms of commuting diagrams was
> disastrous. Fortunately, I got a summer job at the Jet Propulsion Lab and
> one of my coworkers, Gus Solomon, gave me the classical constructive
> definition of tensor products. Sammy Eilenberg came by Eugene and gave a
> lecture on CT which did nothing to change my opinion of it. When I heard of
> Serge Langs's characterization of CT as "abstract nonsense" it reinforced
> what I already thought (See however,
>
>                            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_nonsense
>
> which does not mention Serge Lang in the body of the article).
>
>
>
...

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