Seven Sketches in Compositionality is easily the best book to get started on Category Theory.<p>Learning something becomes highly fun and enjoyable when the authors/lecturers are deliberately trying to make it so.<p><i>Most</i> books on anything serves to document something and looks like accumulated notes that are an overt attempt to impress the authors' peers. There is no focus on actually teaching.<p>This book is not like that. This book focuses entirely on teaching, tries deliberately so that you can learn.<p>Some other books that I have come across in my life are:<p>1. Intro to Electrodynamics by Griffiths<p>2. High School Physics book by Halliday, Resnick, Walker.<p>3. ToC book by Sipser.<p>You get the idea.
I find this topic fascinating but hard to start with.<p>Does anyone have any non-Haskell example of category theory? Something that shows why is useful with a use-case.
Within the applied category realm where seven sketches lives, there are low-level concrete industrial applications that are becoming increasingly dominant with key industry players in quantum tech. The most known one is ZX-calculus which is explicitly used in things like compiler optimisation, error-correction, translations between computational models etc. This might be the 1st time that CT is playing a central role in a new technology. The reason is the high-level connotation that has been pushed far too long concerning category theory, originating in its abstract mathematical origins.<p>Bob Coecke, Chief Scientist, Quantinuum.
N00b question here. Does the mathematical characterization of category theory relate in any way to the bridges that the Langlands program is building ?
I have read and understood enough Category Theory to realise that it is kinda fun/interesting if you enjoy abstract math. But it won’t make you a better software (or Haskell) developer. I would instead recommend learning Coq/Lean/Idris/Agda to move up the abstraction level from Haskell, while still learning things that are relevant to developing software.
I have some interest in the topic (thanks to Arraycast and Conor Hoekstra) and bought to Mock a Mockingbird by Raymond Smullyan, however it is still a bit too involved for my small brain.<p>On the other hand, I am very much enjoying How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng, which is a few levels down in difficulty.