Dear Ross, no, that's pretty good! It's mildly surprising that it took ~20 years for the name to 'stick', but maybe less so given that the field grew slowly to start. Thanks, David David Roberts Webpage: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/David+Roberts Blog: https://thehighergeometer.wordpress.com On Thu, 11 Jul 2019 at 08:21, Ross Street <ross.street@mq.edu.au> wrote:
Dear David
From memory, the Pure Mathematics Honours (USyd) course that Max Kelly taught in 1965 was called ``Category Theory''. It concentrated on different kinds of morphisms and factorizations in a category, and finished with adjoint functors. Also John Gray's (UIllinois) 1968-69 graduate course had that name.
From Eilenberg I heard that each person using categories should have their own category of expertise. I told this to John Gray who said that was fine; the time had come for that category to be Cat.
I would suggest that the first category theorists to think of themselves as such were Eilenberg's students at Columbia. However, Mac Lane was definitely a category theorist.
This is probably not the verifiable stuff you were seeking.
Ross
On 10 Jul 2019, at 10:01 PM, David Roberts <droberts.65537@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
the (idle) question is: when did the phrase 'category theory' catch on for the field? Clearly it didn't leap from either of the heads of Eilenberg or Mac Lane full-grown, since they used the phrase 'General theory of natural equivalences'. There are the old 'Reports of the Midwest Category Seminar' lecture notes (the first in 1967), which hints that 'category theory' wasn't quite the name in use.
Even more interesting: who was the first "category theorist", by that name?
Answers referring to verifiable sources would be best.
Thoughts?
David
David Roberts Webpage: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/David+Roberts Blog: https://thehighergeometer.wordpress.com
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