On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 03:30:30PM -0800, peasthope@shaw.ca wrote:
... but how prevalent is the subject in undergraduate programs?
For the record, there was a course in category theory for undergraduates at Monash University (Melbourne) in the early 1970s. This was in the third year of what, for people interested in mathematics, was usually a four-year degree. It was taught by G B Preston, as in `algebraic theory of semigroups' using MacLane and Birkhoff (1967, not Birkhoff and MacLane). It partly took the line that category theory unified the basic algebraic and topological constructions and partly that it was a subject to study in its own right. Students then were simultaneously being taught the general Tichonoff theorem using ultrafilters, smooth manifolds and multilinear algebra (more universal constructions, as in Greub), and Hilbert space theory. This provided a strong context for category theory. Heady days. Kirill -- ===================================== http://kchmackenzie.staff.shef.ac.uk/ ===================================== [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]