Well it does. Since I started a burst of intense category theory reading a couple of weeks ago (not that intense as I have a full time job) I've been showing unpleasant symptoms. These include insomnia, lack of concentration and grumpiness. We're not just talking correlation here, I have causal mechanisms too: how can I sleep when an example of an adjunction might pop into my mind at any moment, how can I concentrate when my brain is already fully occupied in finding those examples, and of course I'm grumpy with all this effort to understand difficult theorems that always turn out to be trivial and content-free. Fortunately I find that drugs help with the insomnia, but there's no cure for the other symptoms.
At least I haven't reached the stage where I sit down to dinner wondering whether or not my eating it is an operation with a left or right adjoint. (But I thought it didn't I, so I must be pretty far gone.) And I'm not dreaming commutative diagrams yet.
So here's my advice: if someone comes up to you in a shady bar or alleyway and offers you a monad, or an adjunction, or even an innocent little natural transformation, just say "no!".
Search This Blog
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Blog Archive
-
▼
2006
(92)
-
▼
March
(20)
- Quantum Probability
- A Neat Proof Technique
- The General Theory of Self-Reproducing Programs
- Stanislaw Lem has Passed Away
- The Most Amazing and Mysterious Thing in All of Ma...
- 6
- Sets, Classes and Voodoo
- The Representation of Integers by Quadratic Forms
- Category Theory Screws You Up!
- What can I do with adjoints? And Lemma 28.
- Answers and questions
- Homotopies between proofs and between programs
- Cellular automaton puzzle
- Coalgebras and Automata
- Hyperfun!
- It's a square, square world!
- Blind Games
- When is one thing equal to some other thing?
- An Actual Application of Fractal Dimension
- A Cautionary Tale for Would-Be Generalisers
-
▼
March
(20)
3 comments:
Right with you on this sigfpe. A few days ago I had an idea for generalising functions to arrows in a language I've been toying with for a while now - my head is just broken right now. I sleep but am not refreshed, I sit at my desk but produce nothing useful and I find myself halfway through conversations in which I have had no concious involvement.
The first time this happened to me was some fifteen years ago. I was engulfed by a game called Kye. It was a simple puzzle game, but the interesting aspect was designing your own levels. I was driving on the motorway (freeway) planning a cunning lock mechanism and found I had missed my exit by three junctions. I cannot account for that fifteen minutes of my life.
Actually, examples of category theoretical principles in casual everyday situations, if possible, would be very cool. In fact our beer debates about everything revolve around analogies all the time. I don't have good enough grasp of the TC yet, so is it naive of me to hope for a useful application of the TC even in the "field" of real life?
I studied Mathematics for 7+ years and must say that there are many hours of my life I just cannot account for. If you study abstract notions, like CT, in any science you will become engulfed. You might be able to pull yourself away for weeks, months, or even years. But, like the island on the TV show Lost it will call you back over and over again.
Post a Comment