20 Dec
2009
20 Dec
'09
2:38 p.m.
2009/12/19 Larry Harper <harper@math.ucr.edu>: mentions
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).
Lang's Algebra uses "abstract nonsense" to describe his favorite kind of one line proof that some given construction (such as tensor product) defines its results uniquely up to isomorphism. It is discussed on the discussion page of the wikipedia article. best, Colin [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]