Course pages 2014–15
Category Theory and Logic
Lecture slides
- lecture 1 (9 Oct)
- lecture 2 (14 Oct)
- lecture 3 (16 Oct)
- lecture 4 (21 Oct)
- lecture 5 (23 Oct)
- lecture 6 (28 Oct)
- lecture 7 (30 Oct)
- lecture 8 (4 Nov)
- lecture 9 (6 Nov)
- lecture 10 (11 Nov)
- lecture 11 (13 Nov)
- lecture 12 (18 Nov)
- lecture 13 (20 Nov)
- lecture 14 (25 Nov)
- lecture 15 (27 Nov)
- lecture 16 (2 Dec)
Lecture summaries
- Lecture 1: Introduction; some history; content of this course. Definition of category. The category of sets and functions. Alternative definitions of category.
- Lecture 2: Commutative diagrams. Examples of categories: posets and monotone functions; monoids and monoid homomorphisms; a poset as a category; a monoid as a category. Definition of isomorphism. Informal notion of a "category-theoretic" property.
- Lecture 3: Terminal objects. The opposite of a category and the duality principle. Initial objects. Free monoids as initial objects.
- Lecture 4: Binary products and coproducts. I-ary products. Cartesian categories.
- Lecture 5: Algebraic signatures. Terms over an algebraic signature and their interpretation in a cartesian category.
- Lecture 6: Equational Logic and its soundness for structures in a cartesian category. The internal language of a cartesian category. Algebraic theories as categories.
- Lecture 7: Exponential objects: in the category of sets and in general. Cartesian closed categories: definition and examples.
- Lecture 8: Intuitionistic Propositional Logic (IPL) in Natural Deduction style. Semantics of IPL in a cartesian closed poset.
- Lecture 9: Simply Typed Lambda Calculus (STLC). Alpha equivalence of terms. The typing relation. Semantics of STLC types and terms in a cartesian closed category (ccc).
- Lecture 10: Capture-avoiding substitution for lambda terms. Semantics of substitution in a ccc. Soundness of the ccc semantics for beta-eta equality of lambda terms.
- Lecture 11: The internal language of a ccc. STLC theories as cccs. The Curry-Howard-Lawvere correspondence. Functors. Contravariance.
- Lecture 12: Identity and composition for functors. Size: small categories and locally small categories. The category of small categories. Finite products of categories.
- Lecture 13: Natural transformations. Functor categories. The category of small categories is cartesian closed.
- Lecture 14: Hom functors. Natural isomorphisms. Adjunctions. Examples of adjoint functors.
- Lecture 15: Theorem characterizing the existence of right (respectively left) adjoints in terms of a universal property.
- Lecture 16: Dependent types. Dependent product sets and dependent function sets as adjoint functors. Equivalence of categories. Example: the category of I-indexed sets and functions is equivalent to the slice category Set/I.
Additional material
- The classic text on category theory is
Mac Lane, Saunders. Categories for the Working Mathematician. Graduate Texts in Mathematics 5, second ed. (Springer, 1988), ISBN 0-387-98403-8.
and is definitely worth looking at if you are feeling mathematically mature. - The Category Theory Seminar is held at 2.15pm on Tuesdays in Room MR5 of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
- Julia Goedecke's Category Theory course for the 2013/4 Mathematical Tripos Part III / Masters of Mathematics.
- Category Theory in the nLab.
- The Catsters' Category Theory Videos.