Category Archives: Math

Reading list

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category_theory#Categorical_programming
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mpf23/

Computer-aided Origami

With really cool bugs!
http://www.langorigami.com/index.php4

Passive polarization clock

Here’s a design for a passive polarization clock.
The sky is polarized in concentric circles around the sun. The polarization of the southern sky moves through around 180 degrees during daylight hours. It is polarized vertically in the morning, horizontally at noon, and vertically again in the evening.
Align slices of polarized film such that [...]

Yoneda embedding as contrapositive and call-cc as double negation

Consider the problem of how to represent negation of a proposition when we only have implication and falsehood:

Since is true and is false, this does what we want.
The contrapositive says has the same truth value as Using only implication, the contrapositive of is

What if we don’t even have [...]

The category GraphUp

The category GraphUp of graphs and Granovetter update rules has

directed finite graphs as objects
morphisms generated by Granovetter rules, i.e. the following five operations:

add a new node. (creation, refcount=0)
given a node add a new node and an edge (creation, refcount=1)
given edges and add an edge (introduction, ++refcount)
remove an edge. (deletion, [...]

Haskell monads for the category theorist

A monad in Haskell is about composing almost-compatible morphisms. Typically you’ve got some morphism and then you think of a reason that you’d rather have where is a functor. In Haskell, though, you don’t define functors right out: you define type constructors, which are like the map of objects in [...]

Another piece of the stone

A few days ago, I thought that I had understood pi calculus in terms of category theory, and I did, in a way.

calculus
model in Set

type
set of values

term
function
(deterministic outcome)

rewrite rule
identity functional

calculus
model in Set

process
set of states

reduction rule
state update rule
(deterministic outcome)

To make lambda calculus into a category, we mod out by the rewrite rules and consider equivalence classes [...]

The Yoda embedding


Continuation passing as a reflection

We can write any expression like as a full binary tree where the nodes denote evaluation of the left child at the right, and the leaves are values:

Figure 1:
[In the caption of figure 1, the expression is slightly different; when using trees, it's more convenient to curry all the functions---that is, replace every [...]

A piece of the Rosetta stone

category
lambda calculus
pi calculus
Turing machine

objects
types
structural congruence classes of processes
where is the natural numbers and is all binary sequences with finitely many ones.

a morphism
an equivalence class of terms
a specific reduction from one process state to the next
a specific transition from one state and position of the machine to the next

dinatural transformation from the constant [...]