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Is the word “internal” at the top of the page a slip for “international”?
I should really have reread what I wrote, but I was in a bit of a rush. I’ve removed the Wikipedia link.
One can reconstruct a bunch of old locations from lists of peoples’ old talks, eg https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~pare/Conferences.html, with Bangor, Como, and Isle of Thorns as famous ones I recognise from around 1990.
Edit: There’s also https://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/#conference which might fill in some gaps
Bob Paré’s talk page seems to give the 1982, 1984, 1987 locations, the categories mailing list page (on mta.ca) doesn’t really give anything useful after all…
I wonder if the 1965 La Jolla conference could be put all the way down the bottom? ;-)
Aha, here’s a list http://www-lmpa.univ-littoral.fr/CT08/
Carvoeiro (2007), White Point (2006), Vancouver (2004), Como (2000), Coimbra (1999), Vancouver (1997), Halifax (1995), Tours (1994), Isle of Thorns (1992), Montreal (1991) and Como (1990).
For later inclusion: CT06 has talk titles and (some) slides. CT08 has titles and some slides.
We should also include the proceedings volumes, eg in TAC or SLNM or etc
Presumably there are some older mathematicians who would be able to give a complete list of the locations of the conferences (including which year the first Category Theory conference took place), but I have not tried asking anyone yet.
The proceedings of the Bangor 1989 conference were published in the Cahiers, explicitly I noted in a listing of my publications:
Cahiers de Topologie et G ́eom. Diff. cat., 32, 1991, first two and a half issues.
I do not have ready access to a copy to see if there were lists of talks, abstracts etc included.
It seems we have (from Bob Paré’s wesbite)
1982 (July), Isle of Thorns (England)
1984 (July), Murten (Switzerland)
and from Bourn’s publication list:
And maybe
Category theory, homology theory and their applications (Battelle Memorial Institute, Seattle, WA, 24 June–19 July 1968)
Third colloquium on categories (Amiens, France, 8–July 1980),
Peter Johnstone sent me a list of CT conferences (and their locations) dating back decades, together with the specific dates! I’m waiting to hear back to see if I can put this straight on the nLab, or if he’d prefer I’d just extract some info from it.
This may be useful.
I cannot recall if the proceedings of Murten were published.
Thanks, Tim. I should add another column that has links to proceedings volumes.
Re 21:
@DavidRoberts Did you end up hearing back from Peter Johnstone about adding this information to the nLab?
@Bryce
Yes! We can upload his pdf, and fill in the table as well, using it
There is the following reference which can be added when a proceedings column is added:
Frustratingly, I tried very hard to find a DOI, and the best I could find was the AMS bookstore link.
Re 26:
It appears the work doesn’t exist as a PDF online, but a table of contents could probably be extracted from Google Books (?).
As an aside, I found this amusing review of the volume:
It is good to know that category theory is alive and well after all these years. We were turned off to category theory by the excesses of the sixties, when a small but loud crowd pretended to reduce all of mathematics to the language of categories. Now at least they have toned down their claims, and category theory has taken its modest place in the mathematical spectrum side by side with lattice theory, more pretentious perhaps than the latter, but with a good pedigree. We wish there were two versions of each of the papers presented at this conference: one for the specialist, as one finds it in this book, and one for the would-be specialist, who needs some direction and encouragement before he or she swallows this morass of definitions.
That seems like a great quote to include on the page! (Seriously.)
The other reviews in the pdf page behind the link are similarly entertaining.
About a book on combinatorics it has to say:
A specialized collection of specialized papers, stricly for specialists, in one of the most specialized specialities of that most special of all subjects
Added Gian-Carlo Rota quote, and a few other references, including the proceedings volumes published in TAC.
I would have this one question for Rota: who is “we”?
Oh, so you buy the assumption that there was “pretention to reduce all of mathematics to the language of categories” and are just wondering who was turned off by this? :-)
Well, “everyone” says it’s true, so it must be true.
The whole bit is hideously smug, except for the last sentence (though again there’s this “we”), which I find understandable.
I find it amusing that Rota talks about lattice theory with equal weight as category theory. I know lattice theory was highly regarded at some point, but I don’t know if this import is still placed on it today.
David: I’m not sure you know this, but Rota did research in and was pretty heavily invested in lattice theory, and was given to pronouncements like “”Never in the history of mathematics has a mathematical theory been the object of such vociferous vituperation as lattice theory.” An exaggeration of a type for which he is renowned. There’s a certain amount of defensiveness about lattice theory sprinkled throughout Indiscrete Thoughts.
@Todd
Yes, I vaguely thought that was the case.
I’ve emailed Bryce the pdf document from Johnstone, as well as some other comments people have sent me privately about a little of the history esp. of the meta-level of the why’s of when conferences did not happen.
Would someone be able to tell me how to upload a PDF to the nlab? Then I can upload the document from Johnstone on the history of CT (this will be quicker than inputing the information manually for the time-being).
@BryceClarke: there are instructions here.
Added PDF list of conferences by sent by Peter Johnstone to David Roberts following an inquiry on the categories mailing list on 23 May 2023.
The list appears to be quite comprehensive, but I imagine it will still take some work to format it for the table on the nLab page.
Added references:
{#CT90} Aurelio Carboni, Maria Cristina Pedicchio, Guiseppe Rosolini (Eds), Category Theory: Proceedings of the International Conference held in Como, Italy, July 22-28, 1990, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1488 (1991) Springer–Verlag, doi:10.1007/BFb0084207
{#CT91} R.A.G. Seely (Ed), Category Theory 1991: Proceedings of the 1991 Summer Category Theory Meeting, Montreal, Canada, Conference Proceedings, Canadian Mathematical Society 13 (1992) American Mathematical Society/Canadian Mathematical Society AMS bookstore.
Added reference
- {#CT81} Klaus Heiner Kamps, Dieter Pumplün, Walter Tholen (Eds), Category Theory: Applications to Algebra, Logic and Topology. Proceedings of the International Conference Held at Gummersbach, July 6-10, 1981, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 962 (1982) Springer–Verlag, doi:10.1007/BFb0066878
and missing anchors to proceedings, in the form {#CTyy}
Added CT99 proceedings:
- {#CT99} J. Adamek, P.T. Johnstone and M. Sobral (Eds), Category Theory 1999: selected papers, conference held in Coimbra in honour of the 90th birthday of Saunders Mac Lane, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 168 Issues 2–3 (2002) journal
For later inclusion: Category Theory and its Applications (Lawvere Festschrift) https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-pure-and-applied-algebra/vol/154/issue/1?
To provide more context for comment 45, here is an (abridged) version of the email I received from Michael Johnson (I’m not sure if there is space in the nLab page to include any of this additional context):
@Bryce #45
Oh, I have that book. If he doesn’t get it to you, I can supply.
Added link to Oberwolfach.
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