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From: JeanBenabou <jean.benabou@wanadoo.fr>
To: David Leduc <david.leduc6@googlemail.com>
Cc: categories <categories@mta.ca>
Subject: Re: Evil in bicategories
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:38:09 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <E1OusX4-0001yt-Dx@mlist.mta.ca> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E1OuQsT-0003hL-P6@mlist.mta.ca>

Dear  all,

Although I'm not a very "religious" person, I respect all religions,  
and I also deeply respect, of course, Category Theory. I hope someone  
will answer the following question:

Is Category Theory a religion?

As far as I know, it is the only part of mathematics (or of many  
other sciences) where words such as "dogma", "doctrine" (let alone  
hyper ones) are used. Recently a few other words with the same  
religious connotation have been added.
The most frequent one being "evil"

Maybe my english isn't so "beautiful", but in all cases where "evil"  
has been used, what is wrong with "wrong" instead?


Le 11 sept. 10 à 04:05, David Leduc a écrit :

>
> In a bicategory, composition of 1-cells is associative up to
> isomorphism. Because it would be evil to insist that h o (g o f) is
> equal to (h o g) o f. However the source and target objects of those
> compositions must be equal. Isn't it evil? Why not weaken this
> requirement by saying that the sources (respectively, targets) of h o
> (g o f) and (h o g) o f must only be isomorphic?
>





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


  parent reply	other threads:[~2010-09-12 12:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-09-11  2:05 David Leduc
2010-09-11 23:23 ` Toby Bartels
2010-09-12  1:28 ` David Roberts
2010-09-12  6:03 ` Jocelyn Paine
     [not found] ` <20100911232358.GA32145@ugcs.caltech.edu>
2010-09-12  6:27   ` David Leduc
     [not found]   ` <AANLkTimbfG0tkjSNZgjL2yADBHnKAXQiHYsAkioEnxJY@mail.gmail.com>
2010-09-12  7:31     ` Toby Bartels
     [not found] ` <20100912073136.GA9115@ugcs.caltech.edu>
2010-09-12 10:22   ` David Leduc
     [not found]   ` <AANLkTi=ZLdVcbvaHPaCfaZhzyDYCdwLNUQTj-5fNZ4p4@mail.gmail.com>
2010-09-12 17:13     ` Toby Bartels
2010-09-12 12:38 ` JeanBenabou [this message]
2010-09-13  0:16   ` David Roberts
2010-09-13 22:28     ` Toby Bartels
2010-09-14 22:32     ` Richard Garner
2010-09-14 15:09   ` Miles Gould
2010-09-12 16:52 ` Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
2010-09-14  6:28 Michael Shulman
2010-09-15  1:12 Vaughan Pratt

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