What can I do with adjoints? And Lemma 28.

By 'do' I mean 'compute'.

In order to teach myself about F-(co)algebras I wrote some literate Haskell that actually made use of them. The neat thing was that it gave me something for nothing. I wrote a generic unfold function (mostly not by thinking about it but by juggling all the functions that were available to me until I found one of the correct type) and I was amazed to find that it did something that I found useful, or at least interesting.

Can I do the same for adjunctions? Unfortunately, all of the examples I tried were basically uninteresting. They were quintessential category theory, you spend ages unpacking the definitions only to find that what you ended up with was trivial. Unlike the fold/unfold case I didn't find myself ever defining a new function that I could use for something.

I did just find this link with some intuition that I'd never read before: 'To get some understanding of adjunctions, it's best to think of adjunction as a relationship between a "path" to an element and a "data structure" or "space" of elements.' Hmmm...none of the category theory books talks about that. I think I can see it: a forgetful functor rubs out the path and just leaves you with the destination. (Don't take my word for it, I'm just guessing at this point.)

Maybe I'm now on target to be able to understand Lambek & Scott which I bought 20 years ago (I'm older than you thought), not really knowing what it was actually about. BTW Check out the review on Amazon: "I was looking for a book for my girlfriend this Christmas and stumbled upon this one..."

And I thought I'd mention Newton's Lemma 28. But after I asked a question about it on Usenet, some other people said far more interesting things that I could ever say.