What are some good intro category theory texts?

What are some good intro category theory texts?

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cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521719162
arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375.
twitter.com/AnonBabble

ncatlab

From the home page:
>We think of this wiki as our lab book that we happen to keep open for all to see.

Great. Sounds like there'll be plenty of clear explanations by lucid-thinking experts

Have you ever seen a thing? Yes you have!
Hace you ever thought about turning one thing into other thing with some rules like associativity and the things having to be the same kind of thing?

CONGRATULATIONS. You are a category theorist. Print this post and it will be valid as a PhD at any institution so you can get hired and start researching categories.

You're confusing math with women's lit, sonny jim. Opinions [math]\ne[/math] facts

What a shit way of writing the female inequality. It is [math] opinions > facts [/math] or its equivalent statement [math] feels > reals [/math]

an introductory algebraic topology textbook

Category theory = poetry?

Adámek, Herrlich, Strecker is pretty good, but more importantly what do you not like about MacLane's classic text?

A very babby introduction can be given by Spivak. If you're comfortable with math you can get through it in 2-3 days easily.
A deeper introduction is is Riehl's text. Both of these are provided as pdfs by the professors.

Awodey or Mac Lane, for topos theory Mac Lane-Moerdijk.

Awodey is only good if you're into CS and logic. I feel like his main examples (those which are supposed to red pill you on a topic) are always on lambda calculus or something. I'm a geometry major and I like MacLane's text way better.

mac lane is a favorite for topos theory

I'm going to say - while big - Borceux's handbook has got to be one of my fav textbooks ever written. When I need to cite any small lemma or basic fact, it's usually Borceux, because he's the only one who actually laid out all the basics in detail.

So - long, but rewarding, and starts from scratch. Lightyears beyond Awodey in my opinion (which is not to say I dislike Awodey, it just serves a different function).

oh yeah and Riehl
but biased bc I know her through mutual friend and she's cool
It's Awodey-esque but the examples actually come from math and not CS, re:

don't learn category theory first. learn graph theory, and supplement with topology. you'll be much happier.

categories are actually just hypergraphs
functors are actually just isomorphisms between hypergraphs
natural transformations are actually just isomorphisms between categories of functors

This, especially Albrecht Dold's text.

heh

cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521719162

I like Basic Category Theory by Tom Leinster; a free pdf version is available at arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375.

It is much shorter than most other books on the topic since it only focuses on the very basics.
But I think that it (therefore) works quite well as an introductory text.

Cool post bra.

I don't like graph theory that much. Any book you like?

>isomorphisms
Homomorphisms*

Yeah, Awodey is a bit (a lot) logicky. Basically you are to choose whether you want to do it from the perspective of a logician or an algebrai(c topologi)st, and that choice gives you Awodey or Mac Lane (respectively) out of those two options.

Kashiwara

If you don’t know abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields) then you can kill two birds with one book by reading Algebra Chapter 0 by Aluffi. He’s got pretty good style and motivates the category theory well.

>he wasn't born with all the knowledge of categories
sorry kid, you're already behind. by the time you publish one paper, I'll have 100 out.