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@ 2005-11-17  3:42 Michael Shulman
  2005-11-18 19:31 ` distributors Michael Shulman
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Michael Shulman @ 2005-11-17  3:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: categories

Hi,

Can anyone tell me the motivation for the use of the term
"distributors" as a synonym for profunctors/bimodules?  Is there
something being distributed?

Thanks,
Mike




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

* Re:  distributors
  2005-11-17  3:42 distributors Michael Shulman
@ 2005-11-18 19:31 ` Michael Shulman
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Michael Shulman @ 2005-11-18 19:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: categories

Thanks to everyone who replied to my email.  The consensus from people
who claim to know (although there were some plausible guesses) is that
the name is by analogy with "distributions" from functional analysis,
which are "generalized functions."  Thus changing "ion" to "or" we get
that "distributors" are "generalized functors."

On 11/16/05, Michael Shulman <shulman@math.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Can anyone tell me the motivation for the use of the term
> "distributors" as a synonym for profunctors/bimodules?  Is there
> something being distributed?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
>
>




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

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