beero1000
Veteran Member
3Blue1Brown, PBS Infinite Series, Mathologer - math is doing well on youtube
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Essence of Calculus
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3Blue1Brown, PBS Infinite Series, Mathologer - math is doing well on youtube
J842P
Veteran Member
How did that Algebra survey class you were going to teach turn out?
I've been meaning to give another stab at reviewing algebra with the hope of scratching the surface of category theory, eventually. I've been playing around a lot with functional programming languages like Haskell and Scala with powerful type systems, which are essentially thinly-veiled wrappers around category theory. So, maybe one day I'll be able to understand what people mean by "applicative functor" and be able to carry on a discussion with those people, instead of my current response which is just "shut up, nerd, functor isn't a real word".
I've been meaning to give another stab at reviewing algebra with the hope of scratching the surface of category theory, eventually. I've been playing around a lot with functional programming languages like Haskell and Scala with powerful type systems, which are essentially thinly-veiled wrappers around category theory. So, maybe one day I'll be able to understand what people mean by "applicative functor" and be able to carry on a discussion with those people, instead of my current response which is just "shut up, nerd, functor isn't a real word".
beero1000
Veteran Member
It went well! Had some great students who put up with me while I learned how to teach an upper-division algebra class.
As for category theory - just jump in, keep the total shock to a minimum and you get used to it.
It's a generalization of pretty much everything, so you've almost certainly seen mathematical objects and relationships that can be viewed categorically. The trick is to not view it in all of its generality, at least at the beginning. Start with graphs, sets, relations, etc - concrete and reasonable things that you have an intuitive grasp of. Once that's handled you can get into the purely abstract bits.To be fair though, while both "functor" and "homomorphism" sound a bit too weird to be considered 'real words', I guess we just need to go with it - neither is as bad (good?) as a "Tits building" or the "ASS Conjecture".
fast
Contributor
I watched the video in its entirety. Something tells me I would not have invented calculus. Fun watch!