Re: History of CT meetings

[Peter Johnstone <ptj@dpmms.cam.ac.uk>]

Dear Robert,

Yes, I was aware of the 1974 Montreal seminar. But I think it falls
outside my self-imposed restriction of including only meetings
held during the summer months (June to September). So too do
the Aarhus `Open House' meetings of 1973 and 1977, since they were
both in May; and the Dalhousie meeting of 1971 which produced SLN 274,
since that was in January.

I've added to the list the earlier Oberwolfach meetings quoted by Walter,
the La Jolla meeting (7-12 June 1965), the Z\"urich meeting of the
Midwest Category Seminar (24-30 August 1970), and the l'Aquila workshop
on categorical topology (31 August-4 September 1994) which I had
overlooked because I didn't attend it.

Best regards,
Peter

On Tue, 13 Jun 2017, Robert Seely wrote:

> Thanks Peter, and now Walter too, for this list - there cannot be a lot of entries still to add, but there's one I'd like to see.
>
> I was going to add mention myself of the Séminaire de Mathématiques Supérieures (Université de Montréal) meeting in spring-early summer 1974, entitled "Méthodes catégoriques en logique mathématique et en théorie des automates", under the nominal direction of S. Takahashi.  At this meeting important series of talks (virtually summer-school-type introductions, combined with state-or-the-art research talks) by Benabou, Joyal, Freyd, Reyes, and many others, made this meeting ground-breaking I think - one might regard it as the "coming of age" of the marriage of logic and categories begun by Bill Lawvere (who I am pretty sure was there too, but my memory is poor after all this time!) less than a decade earlier.  (Much as the  Boulder meeting was often regarded in a similar light for the connections between categories and computer science.)
>
> But sadly, I cannot give the exact dates (May or June '74?) for that meeting.  I kept a student's diary at the time, but seem to have lost it, so have no records myself to base this information on.  Surely someone can help with this?
>
> -= rags =-
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tholen@mathstat.yorku.ca
> To: "Peter Johnstone" <ptj@dpmms.cam.ac.uk>
> Cc: "Categories mailing list" <categories@mta.ca>, tholen@mathstat.yorku.ca
> Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 3:45:46 PM
> Subject: categories: Re:  History of CT meetings
>
> Thanks, Peter, for compiling this list, this is great!
>
> There were also "Kategorien" meetings at Oberwolfach in 1972 and 1973,
> organized by John Gray and Horst Schubert, which were probably
> instrumental in establishing the tradition of summer conferences in
> category theory:
>
> Oberwolfach, 23-29 July, 1972,
> Oberwolfach, 22-28 July, 1973.
>
> When leafing through the Oberwolfach archives (to recall the dates
> above), to my surprise, I saw that there was also a summer conference
> on "Kategorien und Funktoren" in 1966, organized by Albrecht Dold and
> Saunders Mac Lane(!):
>
> Oberwolfach, 17-23 July, 1966.
>
> This was just one year after the 1965 La Jolla meeting, probably to be
> considered the first major international conference on category theory
> ever. In Aveiro (CT2015) we acknowledged the 50th anniversary of that
> pivotal conference.
>
> With the help of all readers of the list (and perhaps by leafing
> through old Springer Lecture Notes), it should be possible to close the
> information gap in the open interval (1966,1972).
>
> Walter
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Peter Johnstone <ptj@dpmms.cam.ac.uk>:
>
>> When the 100th PSSL meeting was held in Cambridge last year, I made
>> public the (almost) complete list of speakers and titles of talks at
>> PSSL meetings, which I've been keeping since they started. A number
>> of people suggested that it would be interesting to have a similar
>> list for the summer CT meetings. I'm afraid that compiling a full
>> list of speakers at such meetings would be beyond my resources, but
>> I thought it might be of interest to make a list of the dates and
>> locations of the meetings. So here is my first attempt at compiling
>> it; it's in the form of a plain TeX document, but should be easily
>> readable as text. At present it begins with the first Isle of Thorns
>> meeting in 1974, simply because that was the first such meeting that
>> I attended; information on earlier meetings, and corrections to the
>> information below, are very welcome.
>>
>> Peter Johnstone
>>
>> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>>


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