Category theory
Teoría de categorías
- Date
- 1945 · confidence high
- Place
- New York (Columbia) and Chicago
- Credited to
- Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane
- People
- 👤 Samuel Eilenberg1913–1998👤 Saunders Mac Lane1909–2005
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
A language of objects, morphisms, functors and natural transformations that describes structures by their relations rather than their content. It became the language of algebraic topology, Grothendieck's algebraic geometry and type theory.
The authors jokingly called it general abstract nonsense.
What it led to
- homological algebra
- Grothendieck schemes
- functional programming (monads)
- homotopy type theory
Built on
- Algebraic topology: homology and fundamental group1895
- Noetherian algebra
Made possible
- Weil conjectures and their proof1949-1974
- functional languages (Haskell)
- theorem provers