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Plenty of people were mentioning lenses at SYCO 1. Can’t say I gained much of a feel for them. De Paiva’s Dialectica interpretation was mentioned in this respect, and apparently Mitchell Riley’s Categories of Optics is the place to go for a broader account.
Curious how many young researchers reference the nLab, but shy away from describing their work there.
Fascinating! I would have naively thought that, whilst obviously the technology has changed, the theory of lenses hadn’t evolved significantly since Spinoza was making them…!
I think this meaning of “lens” is a mathematical one…
Oh, oops!
Sorry, I thought you were joking, or I would have answered myself.
Hehe, no problem. As will now be evident, I hadn’t actually clicked on the links!
But saying “lenses” and on top of that “optics” without any further qualification, as I see them do, is actively conjuring misunderstanding.
I had had exactly the same thought that Richard had - and how should one not? - until I finally opened one of the articles.
Hopefully there is enough substance in the theory to make up for this grandiose highjacking of terms?
Do you similarly object to words like “chromatic homotopy theory”? Mathematics has always stolen words from outside mathematics and given them new mathematical meanings.
According to this page,
The name lens goes back to Benjamin Pierce’s work on bidirectional programming. … Before that they were a folklore technique in the functional programming world, known as ’functional references”
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