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Jeremy Gibbons (Sep 01 2025 at 10:59):@Ryan Wisnesky mentioned this book back in 2022 ( ). Has anyone read it and come up with an opinion about it? The website (https://categoricalfuture.com/) is frustratingly coy: the two plaudits mention "magic", the tiny excerpt is vague, and there is no table of contents. There's a longer excerpt at Amazon, but it is no less vague.
David Corfield (Sep 01 2025 at 12:06):Coy, indeed! If it hadn't been for what's included in more resources, it wouldn't have been clear to me that 'categorical' is referring to category theory.
Jeremy Gibbons (Sep 01 2025 at 12:17):Precisely.
John Baez (Sep 01 2025 at 14:00):My antivirus software keeps issuing warnings after I tried to visit this website. It's still saying "Threat removed", over and over.
So I'm not sure I like this book.
Ryan Wisnesky (Sep 01 2025 at 15:56):I will contact the authors to mention the website issue and to see if free pdf copies are available. FWIW, I worked with the authors on some category theory related projects at Chevron such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14457 ; I understand the book to be their attempt to motivate their peers and others to apply category theory / formal methods more generally to their day jobs in IT and engineering. cc @Brandon Baylor
Jeremy Gibbons (Sep 01 2025 at 16:01):Thank you, Ryan. I don't expect them to provide me with a free PDF of the whole thing. But I would be interested in (and I think it is in their interests to provide) more detail as to what the content actually looks like - as might be furnished by a table of contents.
Ryan Wisnesky (Sep 01 2025 at 16:39):IMG_0713.jpg
Here's the table of contents
Jeremy Gibbons (Sep 01 2025 at 17:02):Thanks. But that's only chapter titles. Are there no section headings - or is it not that kind of book? (Does category theory not actually play any role until the final chapter?)
Ryan Wisnesky (Sep 01 2025 at 17:13):I don't think it's that kind of book, although there may be sub headings in the text. There's only that table of contents, then the intro, then the chapter content. Imo it's not really a math book; it contains many expository examples of engineering systems where some kind of failure has occurred because no one was looking at the composed whole, only the local sub systems. But Brandon Baylor should be along to speak directly about the book's intention.
Cole Comfort (Sep 04 2025 at 02:22):I remember that this book was advertised during the industry session of ACT 2023, where is was marketed as category theory for business. The talk was so shocking to me that I looked around for excerpts of the book on the internet, and found one on google books, which is no longer available. The excerpt I read was extremely questionable to say the least.