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John Onstead (Jul 01 2024 at 15:21):Since I've been watching so many category theory videos recently, the Youtube algorithm has been recommending me new "Intro to CT" videos regularly. I've seen some pretty good examples, such as the sensible introduction to CT by Oliver Lugg and videos by Eyesomorphic (who also explained lambda calculus recently in a way I could actually almost understand!). However, yesterday I came across the following video by Di Beo's which I didn't find as helpful as those other ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKixqJ9xnRM
The presentation seemed disjointed (such as introducing the property of identity and associativity twice within a few minutes), some of the visuals seemed misleading (I think they could mislead someone into thinking an individual mapping of one set element to another was a "morphism" in Set), and I think they missed the point of Lawvere theories entirely. But since I'm still learning the subject in the beginning stages, I wanted to come on here and ask others what they thought of the video. Am I right to not find this video helpful, or is it just teaching the subject in a different way to how I learned it?
Eric M Downes (Jul 01 2024 at 17:46):I did not like it either.
FWIW. These videos are better. Perhaps it is worth it to assemble a list of the good, to drown out the bad. I'll go first.
Beautiful intro for people who have any familiarity with matrix/linear algebra
Emily Reihl
actual lecture series in ~ increasing levels of sophistication.
Richard Southwell
David Spivak and Brendan Fong
Bartosz Milewski
Somebody on sheaves
Richard Borcherds
Somebody else following nLab homotopy theory; very categorical)
Eric M Downes (Jul 01 2024 at 17:53):oh! and the Catsters of course (Eugenia Cheng and others).
John Onstead (Jul 01 2024 at 20:34):Thanks for the resource list, I'll go look at the ones I didn't see yet.
Fun fact, Richard Southwell is how I mainly first started learning about category theory. I actually wanted to invite him to the server to chat, and also because I thought he would have good insights and intuitions for the questions asked here. But it didn't happen and I didn't want to be too disruptive!