Category Theory as a Structuralist Foundation for Mathematics
Time and place:
12:30 PM on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009; NAC 4113
Description:
Speaker: Michael Levin (Department of Philosophy)
It is often said that mathematics studies "structure," an idea that has been picked up by a number of philosophers. This idea has certain advantages over thinking of mathematics as a body of inferences from uninterpreted postulates, and also the platonistic idea that, e.g., number theory is about Numbers. Category theory might be thought of as "structuralism in action." I will illustrate this idea with a discussion of the "number objects" in arbitrary categories. Time permitting, I will say a little about the category axioms themselves.
