A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory - the calculational approach

Maarten M Fokkinga

In these notes we present the important notions from category theory. The intention is to provide a fairly good skill in manipulating with those concepts formally. What you probably will not acquire from these notes is the ability to recognise the concepts in your daily work when that differs from algorithmics, since we give only a few examples and those are taken from algorithmics. For such an ability you need to work through many, very many examples, in diverse fields of applications.

This text differs from most other introductions to category theory in the calculational style of the proofs (especially in Chapter~\ref{ch:constructions} and Appendix~\ref{moreonadjointness}), the restriction to applications within algorithmics, and the omission of many additional concepts and facts that I consider not helpful in a first introduction to category theory.

Full paper reachable via: here (80 pages).

Bibtex data

@incollection{mmf92b
,author = "Fokkinga, M.M."
,booktitle = "Lecture Notes of the {STOP} 1992 {S}ummerschool on
{C}onstructive {A}lgorithmics"
,month = sep
,pages = "1--72 of Part 1"
,publisher = "University of Utrecht"
,title = "A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory --- the
calculational approach"
,year = "1992"
}