From May until September 2018, John Baez taught a free online course called Applied Category Theory. The lectures and exercises from that course are available here.
The course was based on this book:
It’s invitation to advanced topics in category theory through concrete, real-world examples. It aims to give a tour: a gentle, quick introduction to guide later exploration. No prior knowledge of category theory is assumed.
The primary purpose of this page is to help you navigate the course, which is being held in the Applied Category Theory Course section of the Azimuth Forum. For a quick overview, try this:
Also, starting in January 2019 there be an Applied Category Theory Seminar at U.C. Riverside, available online. Click for details!
Here is the course material:
Start the course here:
The motivation for choosing preorders as our first kind of category for study is to illustrate “generative effects”. To read and join discussions on Chapter 1 go here:
You can also do Exercises and Puzzles. Here are the lectures on Chapter 1:
Chapter 2 is about resource theories. These allow us to tackle questions like:
The technical tools you’ll learn in this chapter include string diagrams, monoidal preorders and enrichment. To read and join discussions on Chapter 2 go here:
You can also do Exercises and puzzles. Here are the lectures on Chapter 2:
Chapter 3 is about databases - and now we will finally meet categories, functors, adjoint functors, and Kan extensions.
To read and join discussions on Chapter 3 go here:
You can also do Exercises and puzzles. Here are the lectures on Chapter 3:
Chapter 4 is about collaborative design, and how we can use enriched profunctors to relate resources to requirements.
To read and join discussions on Chapter 4 go here:
You can also do Exercises and puzzles.
Puzzles are created by class members.
Here are the exercises from the book, often with solutions:
For information on how the Azimuth Forum works, see:
A discussion was started but the proper place to record and track errors in the text is here.
By John Baez:
By others:
Candidates for becoming wiki pages include:
These are fun digressions: