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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: B. Fong and D. I. Spivak, "An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Description: Category theory is well-known for abstraction—concepts and tools from diverse fields being recognized as specific cases of more foundational structures—though the field has always been driven and shaped by the needs of applications. Moreover, category theory is rarely introduced even to undergraduate math majors, despite its unifying role in theory and its flexibility in application.Postdoctoral Associate Brendan Fong and Research Scientist David I. Spivak, both at MIT, have written a marvelous and timely new textbook that, as its title suggests, invites readers of all backgrounds to explore what it means to take a compositional appr...