Dear Colleagues, Referring to Julian Rohrhuber's message of February 20: I don't think it is a good idea to cut a sentence in the middle and then call it "somewhat arrogant", especially when it is from a paper of Saunders Mac Lane. The full sentence is: "There was also some fun with the choice of terminology. Since the philosopher Kant had made ample use of general categories, the term was borrowed from him for its present mathematical use, while Camap, in his book on Die Logische Syntax der Sprachen had talked of functors in a different sense and made some corresponding mistakes. It seemed in order to take over that word for a better and less philosophical purpose." Let me also add a sentence from Mac Lane's paper "Samuel Eilenberg and Categories" (JPAA 168, 2002, 127-131): "Also the terminology was largely purloined: “category” from Kant, “natural” from vector spaces and “functor” from Carnap. (It was used in a different sense in Carnap’s influential book “Logical Syntax of Language”; I had reviewed the English translation of the book (in the Bulletin, AMS) and had spotted some errors; since Carnap never acknowledged my finding, I did not mind using his terminology.)" Referring to Michael Barr's message of February 19, which is: "I don't know what is mysterious about the origin of functor. It is a 2-function and they surely wanted to suggest a variant of function. But this illustrates a point I have been trying to make for decades to so-called mathematical historians. While they have been grinding the origins of calculus finer and finer, they are allowing contemporary history to disappear. If someone had interviewed Eilenberg or Mac Lane at length 30 years ago we would know why they chose functor. And much much more. Now they are gone. Bill Lawvere is gone. There are still a few of the older category theorists left, but probably not for long. But this is why I have been posting these historical notes." So very true! However, this is not just about "so-called mathematical historians", but also about certain mathematicians who tell historians what is important in mathematics and what is not. And it is also about many of us, who, for example, did nothing with the unthinkable article "Timeline of category theory and related mathematics" in Wikipedia and a similar article in nLab (well, both of them have a lot of good mathematics mentioned, but putting 'selected good' and 'selected bad' together, might be the worst kind of disinformation...). George ---------- You're receiving this message because you're a member of the Categories mailing list group from Macquarie University. Leave group: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/categories@mq.edu.au/groupsubscription.ashx?source=EscalatedMessage&action=leave&GuestId=6bf90c14-94d1-45b7-a0b5-9dd447734d27