Re: Our friend Bob Walters

[Ross Street <ross.street@mq.edu.au>]

Dear Colleagues

This is devastating news. 

Bob started at Sydney University after finishing his PhD in 1970 at 
the Australian National University. I started at Macquarie the same
year. That is when our friendship and collaboration began. He was
an exciting person to work with and I admired him greatly. We
started thinking about Yoneda structures almost immediately.

Bob was a major influence on category theory in general but
especially on Australian category theory. His charismatic lectures
to undergraduates at Sydney University encouraged many students 
to continue in mathematics and category theory. He saw early, 
in his own original terms, how categories applied to computer
science.

One of Bob’s great achievements was understanding Higg’s
work on Heyting-valued equality in the light of Bill Lawvere’s
insight into Cauchy completion via adjointness. This gave a
vital reason for extending enriched category to a base bicategory.

There is so much to Bob’s work and influence. 

The latest issue of Applied Categorical Structures landed on my 
desk just last week; Bob is a joint author of a paper there. 

I was hoping to see Bob at CT2014 in Cambridge. He had planned
to go and to speak. This wasn’t to be.

As Bill said, our deepest condolences are with his family. 

Ross
 
 

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