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    • CommentRowNumber1.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 27th 2013
    • (edited Nov 27th 2013)

    In the category:people-entry “William Lawvere” I have created a subsection “Motivation from foundations of physics” where I want to collect pointers to where and how Lawvere was/is motivated from finding foundations for (classical continuum) physics.

    Explicit evidence for this that I am aware of includes notably the texts Toposes of laws of motion and the introduction to the book Categories in Continuum Physics.

    The Wikipedia entry has this about motivation from physics:

    Lawvere studied continuum mechanics as an undergraduate with Clifford Truesdell. He learned of category theory [...][...] found it a promising framework for simple rigorous axioms for the physical ideas of Truesdell and Walter Noll. [...][...] meeting on “Categories in Continuum Physics” in 1982. Clifford Truesdell participated in that meeting, as did several other researchers in the rational foundations of continuum physics and in the synthetic differential geometry which had evolved from the spatial part of Lawvere’s categorical dynamics program). Lawvere continues to work on his 50-year quest for a rigorous flexible base for physical ideas, free of unnecessary analytic complications.

    Question: Can anyone point me to more on this early phase of the story (graduate student is supposed to start to look into continuum mechanics, starts to wonder “What is a vector field, really?, what a differential equation?” and ends up revolutionizing the foundations of differential calculus)?

    • CommentRowNumber2.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Found something concerning my question above: p. 8 of

    • An interview with F. William Lawvere (pdf)
    • CommentRowNumber3.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    The link seems to be down.

    • CommentRowNumber4.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013
    • (edited Nov 28th 2013)

    Sorry, which link seems to be down?

    (The interview pdf works for me. Maybe the nLab was down, is that what you mean?)

    • CommentRowNumber5.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Have you seen ’Comments on the development of topos theory’, in Development of Mathematics 1950-2000, Volume 1, Google Books? Especially p. 726. But there’s not much detail.

    • CommentRowNumber6.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013
    • (edited Nov 28th 2013)

    Ah, thanks for the pointer. I must have seen this before, but forgot about it.

    Okay, let’s just be careful with that happens on the top of p. 726: that’s about “distribution on a topos” and that’s the notion where I still don’t really see what the impact is. There is the other notion of “distribuion on an object in a topos” which is the one I refer to above, and which is the one that has a clear impact, in that it subsumes and unifies traditional distributions, traditional generalized homology etc.

    Then further below on that p. 726 I find exactly what I was looking for, another explicit statement of how he was all motivated by formalizing physics. I’ll extract this to the nLab entry now, too. Thanks.

    • CommentRowNumber7.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    I meant the pdf with the interview, but it’s working now.

    Regarding distributions on toposes, I think Bunge and Funk talk about this in their monograph, I think. I didn’t spend time trying to understand it, but they gave a very down to earth example early on (in fact it’s mind-blowing how they get from a weather balloon to what they discuss next - but this is all from memory so caveat emptor).

    • CommentRowNumber8.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Thanks, David, I know about Bunge-Funk. What i maybe still need is somebody to point out to me what is mind-blowing about it. I am still not sure if I see it.

    • CommentRowNumber9.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013
    • (edited Nov 28th 2013)

    I have further edited the entry William Lawvere. Added at the beginning more lines on the formalization of unity of opposites. Then I expanded the list of writings a bit more and tried to make sure that it is entirely in correct chronological order.

    Finally I added the following further quote in the section on motivation from physics:


    In 2000 in Comments on the development of topos theory Lawvere writes in the closing section 7 titled “From and to continuum physics”:

    What was the impetus which demanded the simplification and generalization of Grothendieck’s concept of topos, if indeed the application to logic and set theory were not decisive. [...][...] My own motivation came from my earlier study of physics. The foundation of the continuum physics of general materials, in the spirit of Truesdell, Noll and others, involves powerful and clear physical ideas, which unfortunately have been submerged under a mathematical appartus [...][...]. But, as Fichera [25][25] lamented, all this apparatus gives often a very uncertain fit to the phenomena. The apparatus may well be helpful in the solution of certain problems, but can the problems themselves and the needed axioms be stated in a direct and clear manner? And might this not lead to a simpler, equally rigorous account? These were the questions to which I began to apply the topos method in my 1967 Chicago lectures [[ Categorical dynamics ]]. It was clear that work on the notion of topos itself would be needed to achieve the goal. I had spent 1961-62 with the Berkeley logicians, believing that listening to experts on foundations might be the road to clarifying foundational questions.

    [...][...] Several books treating the simplified topos theory (MacLane-Moerdijk being the most recent and readable text), together with the three excellent books on synthetic differential geometry [...][...] provide a solid basis on which further treatment of functional analysis and the needed development of continuum physics can be based.


    In the course of this I have created further category:reference entries such as for

    • CommentRowNumber10.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Speaking of Bill Lawvere: somewhere I read an interview of him where he was describing a debate he had attended between Dana Scott and someone else, maybe Montague, on the semantics of higher-order logic, involving at some point a discussion about induction along iterated membership chains, and how his (Lawvere’s) negative reaction to this was partly influential in his development of categorical set theory in the early 60’s. (This is to the best of my recollection, so possibly garbled.) But my past few attempts to track down this interview have failed. Does anyone know about this?

    • CommentRowNumber11.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Not sure, I suppose you did look through the interview linked to above (pdf).

    He does talk a bit there about his point of rejecting the material membership relation etc. But maybe it’s not exactly what you had seen.

    But generally I second the reference request: if anyone has further pointers to documents by/about Lawvere, please share. It’s time to collect them usefully in one place.

    • CommentRowNumber12.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    added one more quote to the section on motivation from physics to the entry William Lawvere:


    In the talk Toposes of laws of motion in 1997, Lawvere starts with the following remark

    I read somewhere recently that the basic program of infinitesimal calculus, continuum mechanics, and differential geometry is that all the world can be reconstructed from the infinitely small. One may think this is not possible, but nonetheless it’s certainly a program that has been very fruitful over the last 300 years. I think we are now finally in a position to actually make more explicit what that program amounts to.

    [...][...] I think that on the basis of these developments we can focus on this question of making very explicit how continuum physics etc. can be built up mathematically from very simple ingredients.

    In the same talk, a few lines later after discussion of infinitesimally thickened points TT, it says:

    The basic spaces which are needed for functional analysis and theories of physical fields are thus in some sense available in any topos with a suitable object TT.

    • CommentRowNumber13.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013
    • (edited Nov 28th 2013)

    Urs, yes, I’ve read that interview. Not the one I was asking about.

    Edit: There’s also this.

    • CommentRowNumber14.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    The website titled “Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy” claims here that it has archived several interviews with Lawvere over the years.

    But I have trouble finding any link to anything archived on that site (?)

    • CommentRowNumber15.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Just for the record, I found the source of that other interview (which was well hidden..)

    It is

    I have added it to the entry.

    • CommentRowNumber16.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    “Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy”

    This is Michael Wright’s collection of hours of audio and visual recordings over decades. 35000 recordings! It includes a several day interview of Lawvere by some top people. I think one was Pierre Cartier.

    The trouble has been one of finding the money to set up the archive.

    • CommentRowNumber17.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    So none of these recordings are available for download anywhere?

    • CommentRowNumber18.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Not as far as I am aware, but I could ask if you like. Surely you know him too, photo. He attends many category theoretic events, and films them.

    • CommentRowNumber19.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    their website says: archmathsci.org is unavailable at the moment.

    Do ask Michael Wright he is usually very helpful. The contact e-mail is at http://www.archmathsci.org/contact/

    • CommentRowNumber20.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2013

    Thanks, maybe I’ll try. But concretely I would have needed material for tomorrow. That’s a bit late now.

    • CommentRowNumber21.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeNov 29th 2013

    @Urs #8

    Only mindblowing in the sense analogous to moving, in one step, from the physical system of a mass falling freely under gravity to symplectic geometry, as if the former were sufficient motivation for the latter. As I said, I didn’t try to understand it either, so I’m in the same boat as you.

    • CommentRowNumber22.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014
    • (edited Jul 4th 2014)
    Re #10: finally I tracked down what has been haunting me for ages. It was actually a long comment by Lawvere at the categories list in a discussion of sets vs. categories. I'll reproduce it here for easy later access:

    Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 22:46:31 -0400 (AST)
    Subject: Re: Set membership <-> function composition

    Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 11:28:59 -0500 (EST)
    From: mthfwl@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

    Younger participants and lurkers in this past week's discussion may be shocked at the large amount of frantic concern to prevent obscurity from becoming extinct. Vaughan Pratt's question: -- should one forget altogether about membership -- `and' -- just work in one's favorite topos? -- still remained unanswered.

    The possibility of rejecting the rigid epsilon chains as a `foundation' for mathematics occurred to many around 1960. But for me the necessity for doing so became clear at a 1963 debate between Montague and Scott. Each had tried hard to find the right combination of tricks which would permit a correct definition of the fundamental concept of a model of a higher-order theory (such as topological algebra). Each found in turn that his proposal was refuted by the other's counter example (involving of course unforeseen ambiguities between the given theory and global epsilon in the recipient set theory).

    The whole difficulty Montague and Scott were having seemed in utter contrast with what I had learned about the use of mathematical English and what we try to make clear to students: in a given mathematical discussion there is no structure nor theorem except those which follow from what we explicitly give at the outset. Only in this way can we accurately express our _knowledge of_ real situations. A foundation for mathematics should allow a general definition of model for higher-order theories which would permit that crucial feature of mathematical English to flourish, confusing matters as little as possible with its own contaminants. We are constantly passing from one mathematical discussion to another, introducing or discharging given structures and assumptions, and that too needs to be made flexibly explicit by a foundation. Of course the reasons for this motion are not whim, but the sober needs of further investigating the relations between space and quantity,etc and disseminating the results of such investigation.

    The idealization of a truly all-purpose computer (on which we might record such discussions) was relevant. The explicit introduction, into a given discussion, of a few inclusion, projection, and evaluation maps on a formal footing with addition, multiplication and a differential equation, etc. clarifies and is a minor effort compared with the complications and collisions attendant on an arbitrary monolithic scheme for keeping them implicit.

    Vaughan's continuing confusion comes he says from Goldblatt 12.4. More exactly, the few lines introducing 12.4 are `In order to...construct models of set theory from topoi, we have to analyze further the arrow-theoretic account of the membership relation'. However, `the' arrow-theoretic account of membership was actually totally omitted from the book, though it should have been in section 4.1, along with the discussion of related basic matters, such as subobjects and their inclusions. (I return to this below). For the stated narrow purpose of constructing models of epsilon-based set theory, one indeed needs an arrow-theoretic account (not of the mathematically useful relation but) of the von Neumann rigid-epsilon monsters. Goldblatt recites such an account, as do several of the dozen or so texts on topos. The construction had been done around 1971 by each of Cole, Mitchell, and Osius. I had suggested the basic approach they used, but in so doing I was just transmitting (in categorical form) what I had learned from Scott about the 1950's work of Specker. Specker is a mathematician (for example it was he who taught R. Bott algebraic topology!) who realized that transitive ZFvNBG `sets' can actually be seen as ordinary mathematical structures (posets) which happen to satisfy some rather non-ordinary conditions (such as no automorphisms, etc.). Certain special morphisms between these structures can be seen as `epsilons' and certain others as `inclusions'; the functor which adjoins a new top element can be seen, for the special structures, as `singleton', and permits to define those two special classes of morphisms in terms of each other. A further insight concerning how these bizarre structures could be studied, if one wished, in terms of ordinary mathematical concepts such as free infinitary algebras, is elegantly explained in the recent L.M.S. Lecture Notes 220 by Joyal and Moerdijk. They too provide, on the basis of the ordinary mathematical ground (of toposes and similar categories) a foundation for those structures; for anyone who is seriously interested in those structures, that book should be an excellent reference. However, for anyone with potential to advance mathematics, such interest should be discouraged, since the time and energy wasted on these things during this century has vastly overshadowed any byproduct contribution to either mathematics or to the foundation of mathematics. Even most set-theorists work mainly on problems with definite mathematical content (such as Cantor's hypothesis, Souslin's conjecture, `measurable' cardinals, etc. etc.) which have no actual dependence on these rigid epsilon chains for their formulation and treatment. That many mathematicians (including some categorists) continue to pay lip-service to an alleged `foundational' role of these chains can only be attributed to the general cultural backwardness of our times; similarly, certain natural scientists 300 years ago felt compelled to refer to a `hand that started the universe' even though they knew it played no role in their work.

    (continued)
    • CommentRowNumber23.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014
    • (edited Jul 4th 2014)
    (continued from previous message)

    It is my impression (though further sifting of the historical record is needed to confirm it) that Hausdorff and other pioneers did not actually give to the rigid epsilon the central role that von Neumann and others later did. Cantor had made several important advances, some of which may have been submerged by the later attempt at a monolithic ideology; my paper on `lauter Einsen' in Philosophia Mathematica (MR'ed by Colin McLarty) describes some potentially useful mathematical constructions which were suggested by Cantor's work but which have nothing to do with an external, rigidly imposed epsilon.

    (Of course, one of Cantor's other contributions was the theorem that non trivial function spaces are bigger than their domain space, which he knew implied that no single set can parameterize a category of sets. It is amazing in hindsight how Frege and Russell managed to transform this theorem into a propaganda scare concerning the viability of mathematics, thus obscuring more serious problems with the `foundation', such as the space-filling curves.)

    The omission by Goldblatt of the definition may have contributed to Vaughan's further misconception that `by toposes...membership is discussed only in power objects.' In the next two paragraphs I recall the definition.

    The elementary membership relation in any category is straightforward, one of the two inverse relations for composition itself, the one which Steenrod called the lifting problem: `y is a member of b' means by definition that there exists x with y = bx. This of course presupposes that y and b have the same codomain, and for uniqueness of the proof x, that b is mono. The mathematical role of these two presuppositions must be understood.

    It became clear in the early sixties that the definition of SUBOBJECT given by Grothendieck is not a pretense, circumlocution, or paraphrase, but the only correct definition. Here `correct' means in a foundational sense, i.e. the only definition universally and compatibly applicable across all the branches of mathematics: a subobject is NOT an object, but a given inclusion map. The intersection of two objects has no sense, for only maps (with common codomain) can overlap. The category of sets is in no way exceptional in this regard. Singleton is not a functor of objects but a natural transformation (from the identity functor to a covariant power set functor in the categories where the latter exists.) Of course, when I say `only definition' it is not meant to exclude consideration of
    further mathematical conditions such as regular monos, closed monos etc whose interest may be revealed by the study of the particular category; nor should we long forget that subobjects are typically mere images of fibrations wherein the question of whether there exists a proof of membership is deepened to a study of particular sections.

    Equality is not obscure, it just keeps changing - but in ways under our control. Here I am speaking of the dual notion to membership, which might be called `dependence' and is just the epic case of Steenrod's extension problem. In commutative algebra for example, what two quantities `are' under a chosen homomorphism may become equal. Neither quotient objects nor subobjects have `preferred' representatives in their isomorphism classes; proposals to introduce such preferred representatives have been justly ignored, since such would only re-introduce spurious complications - of course in any topos further objects do exist which can support maps that PARAMETERIZE precisely these isomorphism classes.

    ****

    One topos becomes another. Only a very limited mathematical agenda could have a favorite topos to stay in, because constructions that one is led to make in E will lead to further toposes E' which are both of interest in themselves and also further illuminate what is possible and necessary in E; indeed the most effective way to axiomatize E is to specify a few key E' which are required to exist. A topos that satisfies both an existential condition concerning sections of epis and a disjunctive condition concerning subsets of 1 is an important attempted extreme case of constancy and non-cohesion, that usually in mathematics becomes a more determinate category of variation and cohesion, modelled via structures sketched by diagrams of specified shapes. It may be occasionally of interest however to consider still more extreme affirmations of constancy such as the lack of objects both larger than a given object and smaller than its power object; Goedel's theorem to the effect that such constancy can always be achieved was shown by W. Mitchell to be independent of any extra-categorical structure such as the epsilon chains which most people had assumed are inherent to the very idea of `constructible'. This might be clarified if Mitchell's tour de force could be replaced by something more direct.

    That startling result of Mitchell and its total lack of follow-up was mentioned by McLarty during this interchange. Mentioned by Loader was another striking result which in its existing form still seems bound up with the epsilon ideology, but which surely could contribute something to the understanding of the category of abstract sets, namely the Martin/Friedman work on Borel determinacy, as I discussed with Friedman twenty years ago. Union and intersection are shadows (in a proof-theory sense) of sums and products, but in this case the tail wags the dog--why? The usual formulation that the replacement schema is required surely depends on a special limitation of the class of theories: how could one statement require a schema? Of course, the proof shows that something is required but what? Replacement can easily be made explicit in a topos, if required; indeed doing so makes it clearer that, in the case of abstract sets, the essence of the schema is just to give more cardinals.

    (continued)
    • CommentRowNumber24.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014
    • (edited Jul 4th 2014)

    (continued from previous message)

    The title of Goldblatt’s book (and not only his!) is in itself misleading. The purpose of topos theory and category theory is not primarily to provide an analysis of logic, but to permit the development of algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, differential topology and geometry, dynamical systems, combinatorics, etc. It emerged in the 1960’s that logic and set theory can and should be viewed as a special distillation of this geometry. In that way the actual achievements of logic and set theory are, reciprocally, enjoying much wider mathematical application.

    Bill Lawvere

    (The original discussion is here.)

    • CommentRowNumber25.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014

    Thank you so much! That is very interesting. Do you have any idea what the paper of Mitchell about constructibility he mentions is? I would very much like to read it.

    • CommentRowNumber26.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014
    • (edited Jul 4th 2014)

    @Mike

    It appears to be this one. In MR, Blass wrote

    In a final section he proves the consistency of the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis relative to the theory of Boolean topoi with natural-numbers-object, by combining the tree technique with Gödel’s theory of constructible sets.

    What Mitchell does is build a model of Z+GCH (check the paper for the precise axioms this means) from a boolean topos (not assuming AC) using constructible versions of the trees in the usual construction of a model of material set theory. He then takes the model of ETCS that comes from this.

    • CommentRowNumber27.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014

    “Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy”

    I overheard Michael Wright talking to one of the Cambridge University Press people at a shindig we had at their shop on Monday. Wright said that they are working on transcribing a lot of material, and were looking for a publisher. Apparently Oxford UP said they weren’t interested, but the CUP guy gave Wright his business card (and then I moved on).

    • CommentRowNumber28.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014

    Oh, that’s disappointing. Lawvere’s comments made it sound to me as though Mitchell had given a categorical interpretation of constructibility, when actually all he does there is mimic the usual \in-theoretic construction inside the tree model.

    • CommentRowNumber29.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeJul 4th 2014
    • (edited Jul 4th 2014)

    McLarty mentions Mitchell’s result as circa 1975, whereas the paper David cited was 1972. So maybe there’s hope. Investigating…

    Edit: Yeah, I have a strong suspicion that it’s actually this paper that Lawvere and McLarty were referring to:

    W. Mitchell. Sets constructible from sequences of ultrafilters. J. Symbolic Logic, 39:57{66}, 1974.

    I don’t have institutional access to say more on this, though.

    • CommentRowNumber30.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2014

    @Todd that paper looks like pure set theory to me (I don’t have access, but I can read the MR review). He shows that from a collection UU of filters satisfying some conditions, the model L[U]L[U] satisfies GCH plus \diamond and the existence of a well-ordering of \mathbb{R} of a certain restricted form. This hardly looks like something Lawvere would hold up as a good example.

    Unless there was some unpublished work, I would claim that the best bet is the 1972 paper.

    • CommentRowNumber31.
    • CommentAuthorThomas Holder
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2014

    I assist David on this: the topic came up again on the list (link) and there Lawvere gives explicit reference with brief comment to

    W. Mitchell Boolean topoi and the theory of sets (the membership-free content of Goedels constructible sets still needs to be clarified further) Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, vol. 2, 1972, pp 261-274

    It is also the only Mitchell paper that Lawvere refers to in ’development of topos theory’ (tac reprint), a paper that exposes his views on universes and set theory (funnily, a picture of Specker appears there although his name is mentioned only once in passing!). The man really likes to play paper-chase.

    • CommentRowNumber32.
    • CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
    • CommentTimeJul 5th 2014

    Hm, okay. I’m all out of ideas then. (Lawvere says this work of Mitchell is a “tour de force” and that his result is “startling”; Mike seems to think it doesn’t really merit such descriptors. I haven’t read it myself.)

    • CommentRowNumber33.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeFeb 27th 2015
    • (edited Feb 27th 2015)

    I have added another reference to the entry on William Lawvere, which I also gave its own category:reference-entry:

    In the course of this I tried to streamline the paragraph on Relation to philosophy a little and added the following quote from Law92:

    It is my belief that in the next decade and in the next century the technical advances forged by category theorists will be of value to dialectical philosophy, lending precise form with disputable mathematical models to ancient philosophical distinctions such as general vs. particular, objective vs. subjective, being vs. becoming, space vs. quantity, equality vs. difference, quantitative vs. qualitative etc. In turn the explicit attention by mathematicians to such philosophical questions is necessary to achieve the goal of making mathematics (and hence other sciences) more widely learnable and useable. Of course this will require that philosophers learn mathematics and that mathematicians learn philosophy.

    I should say that in this vein I have been collecting material on the nLab as of late, all of which however is in rough form, just collecting notes. For instance at objective and subjective logic, Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza’s system, idealism, speculation, mysticism, Meister Eckhart and maybe other. And, yes, I keep working on the entry Science of Logic, even though I am trying to stop.

    • CommentRowNumber34.
    • CommentAuthorJohn Baez
    • CommentTimeJun 4th 2015
    • (edited Jun 4th 2015)

    I added a couple more items to the list of Lawvere’s papers, and tried to get the list closer to being in chronological order. (It was close, except for a bunch of items at the bottom.)

    I also removed the word “pure” from the sentence

    F. William Lawvere is an influential pure category theorist.

    As far as I can tell he was always interested in applying his ideas, and - unless someone convinces me otherwise - I think he’d reject being characterized as a “pure category theorist”.

    • CommentRowNumber35.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeAug 27th 2015
    • (edited Aug 27th 2015)

    I updated links to a couple of IMA preprints that had changed, and links to Numdam from pdf-direct links to the article page (so people can get djvu if they want).

    Note also that the wordpress blog conceptual mathematics is not accessible any more, without a password, so links to there are kind of useless to most people.

    • CommentRowNumber36.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeJun 4th 2018

    Added the reference: An elementary theory of the category of sets, 1964

    diff, v67, current

    • CommentRowNumber37.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeMay 21st 2019

    have added journal-links to

    • Categories of spaces may not be generalized spaces, as exemplified by directed graphs, preprint, State University of New York at Buffalo, (1986) Reprints in Theory and Applications of Categories, No. 9, 2005, pp. 1–7 (tac:tr9, pdf)

    diff, v71, current

    • CommentRowNumber38.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeSep 26th 2019

    Corrected a date.

    diff, v75, current

    • CommentRowNumber39.
    • CommentAuthorDmitri Pavlov
    • CommentTimeSep 28th 2019

    Replaced a broken link by a link to Web Archive.

    diff, v76, current

    • CommentRowNumber40.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeJan 31st 2020

    Changed dead link.

    diff, v77, current

    • CommentRowNumber41.
    • CommentAuthorDELETED_USER_2018
    • CommentTimeMay 24th 2021
    • (edited Apr 11th 2023)

    [deleted]

    • CommentRowNumber42.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeJul 20th 2021

    Added a recent reprint

    • Toposes generated by codiscrete objects in combinatorial topology and functional analysis, Reprints in Theory and Applications of Categories, No. 27 (2021) pp. 1-11, pdf.

    diff, v82, current

    • CommentRowNumber43.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJan 25th 2023

    As I’m sure most have seen now, Lawvere is no longer with us. Someone edited the page accordingly, but didn’t make a comment, so the change didn’t end up here.

    • CommentRowNumber44.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeAug 2nd 2023

    just to note that earlier today (revision 91) somebody added (here) a couple of broken links for “Introduction to Linear Categories and Applications”

    Let’s either fix these links if we have them or else remove them

    (GoogleSearch doesn’t know which file could be meant)

    diff, v92, current

    • CommentRowNumber45.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeAug 2nd 2023

    Matt Earnshaw is the guy who maintains a github for Lawvere’s works, and it seems he’s uploaded there a 94 page pdf on these lectures. Did he mean to upload it here, or just point to his page (here)?

    • CommentRowNumber46.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeAug 2nd 2023

    Thanks. I have made it point (here) to that github page instead

    and removed the request for a stand-along nLab page (which probably was not the intention)

    diff, v93, current

    • CommentRowNumber47.
    • CommentAuthorMatt Earnshaw
    • CommentTimeAug 5th 2023

    Thanks for fixing this. Actually, I meant to upload the file to nlab, to have a mirror. However, when I tried to do this, I got an HTTP 500 error when trying to upload, and later forgot to retry/edit.

    It’s not a big deal either way. However, perhaps the server error needs to be looked into?

    • CommentRowNumber48.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeAug 5th 2023

    Thanks, I see.

    Not sure what caused that error. I have tried again now and it worked. The file is now at :

    diff, v94, current

    • CommentRowNumber49.
    • CommentAuthorThomas Holder
    • CommentTimeAug 11th 2023

    Added

    A video of the commemorative special session in honour of Bill Lawvere from CT2023 can be found here: recording

    that was brought up in the other link. Not quite sure if I chose a place in the entry though.

    diff, v96, current

    • CommentRowNumber50.
    • CommentAuthorelias_guisado
    • CommentTimeDec 19th 2023

    Fixed Spanish ortography

    diff, v97, current