A note of clarification

Standard

It seems that I’ve befuddled a fair share of people already by placing the previous post in the categories ‘Objects and Morphisms’ and ‘Functors and Natural Transformations’. Though yes, Schur’s lemma can be garbed in categorical livery, there was no mention of that anywhere, and now, everybody feels duped. So, first of all, I offer my sincerest apologies. All this was intended to be merely a sardonic commentary on the lamentable state of affairs today where the ordinary folk out there hijack perfectly reasonable mathematical terminology, corrupt its meaning and use it for various diabolical purposes in their day-to-day lives. And to clear things up, I’ll briefly talk about the scheme (oops!) according to which I’m categorizing posts here.

All posts that have something to do with mathematics (as in, mathematics-for-mathematics’-sake) are placed in ‘Functors and Natural Transformations’. Likewise, all those that have something to do with physics, are placed in ‘Objects and Morphisms’. And just to miff the chemists, biologists, economists, anthropologists et al, posts relating to their respective disciplines shall be placed in ‘Sets and Functions’. :D

The subcategories are given more conventional names such as ‘Gravitation and Cosmology’ and ‘Algebraic Geometry’. Of course, this becomes an issue when I actually want to talk about Categories, with a capital C, that is. For that, I shall use the more descriptive ‘General Abstract Nonsense’ or ‘Diagram Chasing’.

I still have no idea what to do about everyone’s enfant terrible - philosophy.

Arpan Saha
IIT Bombay

P. S.: I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping a fortnightly schedule works out. And thank you, everyone, for your overwhelming response. :)

About these ads

3 Responses »

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s