From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/9950 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Vaughan Pratt Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: "First" use of 'Category theory' to describe our field Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2019 15:14:01 -0700 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Vaughan Pratt Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Injection-Info: blaine.gmane.org; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:195.159.176.226"; logging-data="242636"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@blaine.gmane.org" Cc: Ross Street , David Roberts , "categories@mta.ca list" To: "La Monte H. P. Yarroll" Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Sun Jul 14 15:22:31 2019 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtp2.mta.ca ([198.164.44.55]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.89) (envelope-from ) id 1hmeSU-0010ti-E0 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Sun, 14 Jul 2019 15:22:30 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:34853) by smtp2.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from ) id 1hmeBC-0004UJ-Kc; Sun, 14 Jul 2019 10:04:38 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1hmeAQ-00007h-4H for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Sun, 14 Jul 2019 10:03:50 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:9950 Archived-At: > From memory, the Pure Mathematics Honours (USyd) course that Max Kelly taught in 1965 was called ``Category Theory''. While I don't recall the course title, my recollection is that the year Max taught category theory to Ross and other third year students was 1964. Max was going to move on to algebraic topology in 1965 (our honours year, 14 in that class including Brian Day and Henry Irgang) until he realized we'd never seen point set topology so he settled for that. The first homework for the latter was to enumerate the T0 spaces up to three points (or perhaps four, which is still feasible for a homework though tedious). In those days I was much more at home with combinatorics than algebra so that was a fun homework for me. Maybe that's why I ended up in computer science. I didn't really warm to algebra until 1979, in particular universal algebra courtesy of Rasiowa and Sikorski, despite having taught a groups-rings-fields course at MIT in 1972, and it was a couple of years more before I started to come to grips with categories. Vaughan On Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 12:06 PM La Monte H. P. Yarroll < piggy.yarroll@gmail.com> wrote: > There's a nice Wikipedia article on "General Abstract Nonsense", but not on > the more formal name. > > On Fri, Jul 12, 2019, 3:45 PM Ross Street wrote: > >> Dear David >> >> From memory, the Pure Mathematics Honours (USyd) course that Max Kelly >> taught in 1965 >> was called ``Category Theory''. It concentrated on different kinds of >> morphisms >> and factorizations in a category, and finished with adjoint functors. >> Also John Gray's (UIllinois) 1968-69 graduate course had that name. >> >> From Eilenberg I heard that each person using categories should have > their >> own category of expertise. >> I told this to John Gray who said that was fine; the time had come for >> that category to be Cat. >> >> I would suggest that the first category theorists to think of themselves >> as such were Eilenberg's students at Columbia. >> However, Mac Lane was definitely a category theorist. >> >> This is probably not the verifiable stuff you were seeking. >> >> Ross >> >> >> On 10 Jul 2019, at 10:01 PM, David Roberts > > wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> the (idle) question is: when did the phrase 'category theory' catch on >> for the field? Clearly it didn't leap from either of the heads of >> Eilenberg or Mac Lane full-grown, since they used the phrase 'General >> theory of natural equivalences'. There are the old 'Reports of the >> Midwest Category Seminar' lecture notes (the first in 1967), which >> hints that 'category theory' wasn't quite the name in use. >> >> Even more interesting: who was the first "category theorist", by that > name? >> >> Answers referring to verifiable sources would be best. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> David >> [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]