Hi Aleks, in the bibliography to my paper "A survey of graphical languages for monoidal categories", I attempted to give be as comprehensive as I could about the history of string diagrams. (I don't claim that the bibliography is complete, of course - but I made a good-faith effort to include at least the main milestones of that history). This includes, for example, two papers of Freyd and Yetter from 1989 and 1992, as well as Yetter's 1992 paper. As another interesting note, it also includes a whole body of work (which I had previously been unaware of) by Stefanescu and others. It turns out that they invented strict symmetric traced categories (with one additional axiom) a full 10 years before Joyal, Street, and Verity, even including a very detailed proof sketch for the completeness of the axioms (w.r.t. a corresponding notion of string diagram). See Remark 5.24 therein. (These papers are had to find in a search, because the terminology is disjoint from modern terminology. Many of them are also difficult to obtain because they were published as technical reports now out-of-print. I have electronic copies of all the listed papers and would be happy to supply them to interested parties). -- Peter http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.3347 Aleks Kissinger wrote:
Hi David,
Could you point me to some papers on this? (both yours and Reshtikhin/Turaev) I'm particularly interested in the "early" history of string diagrams (i.e. between Penrose 71 and J&S 91) and diagrammatic notation in general.
Best,
Aleks
On 13 June 2013 18:55, David Yetter <dyetter@math.ksu.edu> wrote:
I'm pleased to see the items quoted from Coecke include "string diagrams" as they are now called.
Although they occur first in Kelly and Laplaza's paper on coherence for compact closed categories, and again in Street's work with Joyal in the mid-80's, I think I was the first person to use them, in public at least, in the form with "coupons" (to borrow the term Reshtikhin and Turaev used a few months later) to represent maps which aren't inherent in the (braided or symmetric compact closed) monoidal structure.
Best Thoughts, David Y.
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