This seems like an excellent advertisement of `thinking categorically' and not necessarily writing in that dialect. jim Larry Harper wrote:
Dear All,
As one of MacLane's working mathematicians who follows the catlist, I would like to add some thoughts about perceptions of category theory (CT). I earned a Bachelor's in Physics at Berkeley in 1960 and went to grad school in Mathematics at the University of Oregon the following fall. In Frank Anderson's graduate algebra course I was first exposed to CT and hated it. My background and ability in algebra were marginal anyway and to have my first definition of tensor product be in terms of commuting diagrams was disastrous. Fortunately, I got a summer job at the Jet Propulsion Lab and one of my coworkers, Gus Solomon, gave me the classical constructive definition of tensor products. Sammy Eilenberg came by Eugene and gave a lecture on CT which did nothing to change my opinion of it. When I heard of Serge Langs's characterization of CT as "abstract nonsense" it reinforced what I already thought (See however,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_nonsense
which does not mention Serge Lang in the body of the article).
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