Categories and functional programming

[Dilawar Singh]

A good friend who is a good mathematician; and like all good mathematician sort of a character, recently  suggested this recently published book. It is also available in PDF format from author homepage. http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/

Amazon recommended this to me, which was the first I've heard of it;
seems to be published only last month. The author is an old Berkeley
classmate, who shifted from homotopy theory to doing category theory
in CS--he got very keen on the idea that it's a good formalism for
databases, and someone in the navy decided to give him a huge pot of
money.  my ex-spouse is a functional programmer and went to some of
his talks and said that everybody in CS knew everything he was saying,
but who knows.  anyhow, none of this matters (and anyhow, this is an
exposition, not a research monograph), because john baez seems to say
that the book is great, and john baez is maybe the best mathematical
expositor around, so you should get access to this somehow.  (and if
you do, i'd be curious to see it.)  and anyhow, said ex-spouse never
succeeded in explaining the same question i asked you about why
category theory should have nontrivial use in cs (beyond as a
convenient language).  maybe this book will explain.

http://www.amazon.com/Category-Theory-Sciences-David-Spivak/dp/0262028131/ref=pd_sim_b_10?ie=UTF8&refRID=1E8CP5GF32A25RG8HQV

Personally I'd recommend this to anyone who likes clean formalism of things. This book motivate the subjects really well and will appeal to those who likes to see a theory working in real world. Those who don't give a damn about useful application can surely look at McLane book on categories.

When reading the book, fire up Haskell interpreter and come up with some 'morphism' between seemingly different mathematical structures.

 

best,
    Dilawar
    NCBS Bagalore