RE: Our friend Bob Walters

[Marta Bunge <martabunge@hotmail.com>]

Dear colleagues and friends,








We have suffered yet another great loss to our categories group - RFC 
(Bob) Walters. The last time I saw him was at the Memorial Conference 
for Aurelio Carboni, Milano, June 2013. The photo whose link is given 
below, taken by Danilo Lawvere, shows from left
to right:  me, George Janelidze, Patrizia Giachetti, Bob Walters, Bill 
Lawvere, and Davide Bernardini. 





https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mjnj9tepsi20gyc/AABGfb5vk-BeTMj4ifB8iIWJa?dl=0








Both Aurelio and Bob worked together during several years at Insubria, 
Como. When Aurelio did not show up at the Calais CT Conference, I asked 
Bob Walters why, and he told me that Aurelio was not sick but worse - 
"disillusioned" with the "new developments"
in Category Theory, a sentiment which several of us shared. Bob 
encouraged me then to visit Aurelio in Como. An interchange of emails 
followed but I could not make it. Aurelio and I had worked together 
during my sabbatical in Genova, 2005-06 and had plans for
a sequel. Our joint paper "The symmetric topos" benefited from his 
incredible algebraic intuition and led to further work. What Aurelio was
  suffering from, however,  was not just disillusionment, as Bob Walters 
and even his wife Patrizia Giachetti believed,
but something much more serious and he died shortly after. 








Having now lost both Aurelio Carboni and Bob Walters has been a big blow
  to our group of colleagues and friends in Italy and elsewhere. My deep 
condolences go to Bob's wife and collaborator Nicoletta Sabadini, to his
  Italian colleagues and friends, and to the
entire Category Theory Community.








Marta Bunge



> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 10:11:03 -0500
> From: wlawvere@buffalo.edu
> To: categories@mta.ca
> Subject: categories: Our friend Bob Walters
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> It is with great sorrow that I inform you of our loss of RFC Walters.
> 
> Bob has been a highly valued friend and collaborator for several decades.
> 
> One of the organizers of the Sydney Category Seminar, as well as of 
> International meetings at Como, his contributions to pure and applied 
> category theory remain of fundamental value in many diverse disciplines. 
> He published one of the first books applying category theory to computer 
> science, and was one of the main developers of Yoneda structures and other 
> explicit concepts guiding category theory in geometry and logic.
> 
> He is sadly missed by his friends and his colleagues all over the world.
> 
> My deepest condolences go to his family.
> 
> Bill Lawvere
> 

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