On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Paul Taylor <pt09@paultaylor.eu> wrote:
The fact is that category theory alienated the rest of the mathematical world. Since the damage had been done in the 1970s, well before my time, I have never managed to work out how this happenned, or who was responsible.
Had it been really *done*? It may be just in "the nature of things" when a community A provides abstract models for community B. Something similar appears in relations between physicists and mathematicians, or between physicists/computer scientists and engineers. When a mathematician is building a math model for some physical theory, his main driving force is a question "What do they *really* do?" As the work is progressing, the question develops into a thesis "they don't actually understand what they do", and with this attitude, the mathematician finally brings something structurally neat to physicists. In a typical good case, the reaction would be like Manin recently formulated in his interview "we always knew that but thank you for attention". In a bad case, ... you know. Isn't it similar to the math vs.category theory case? For some people structural clarity and elegance is a matter of life and death, for others it's a dispensable luxury (it's a rephrasing of Edsger Dijkstra if I remember right). zd [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]