Categories for the Working Mathematician

Saunders Mac Lane (auth.)0387984038, 9780387984032

Categories for the Working Mathematician provides an array of general ideas useful in a wide variety of fields. Starting from the foundations, this book illuminates the concepts of category, functor, natural transformation, and duality. The book then turns to adjoint functors, which provide a description of universal constructions, an analysis of the representations of functors by sets of morphisms, and a means of manipulating direct and inverse limits. These categorical concepts are extensively illustrated in the remaining chapters, which include many applications of the basic existence theorem for adjoint functors. The categories of algebraic systems are constructed from certain adjoint-like data and characterized by Beck’s theorem. After considering a variety of applications, the book continues with the construction and exploitation of Kan extensions. This second edition includes a number of revisions and additions, including two new chapters on topics of active interest. One is on symmetric monoidal categories and braided monoidal categories and the coherence theorems for them. The second describes 2-categories and the higher dimensional categories which have recently come into prominence. The bibliography has also been expanded to cover some of the many other recent advances concerning categories.

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Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages i-xii
Introduction….Pages 1-5
Categories, Functors, and Natural Transformations….Pages 7-30
Constructions on Categories….Pages 31-53
Universals and Limits….Pages 55-78
Adjoints….Pages 79-108
Limits….Pages 109-136
Monads and Algebras….Pages 137-159
Monoids….Pages 161-190
Abelian Categories….Pages 191-209
Special Limits….Pages 211-232
Kan Extensions….Pages 233-250
Symmetry and Braidings in Monoidal Categories….Pages 251-266
Structures in Categories….Pages 267-287
Back Matter….Pages 289-317