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John Baez (Jan 11 2022 at 19:02):Eugenia Cheng is coming out with a new book on category theory, The Joy of Abstraction. It looks like it'll reach a lot of people for whom the existing books don't work so well.
John Baez (Jan 11 2022 at 19:06):It's coming out from Cambridge University Press.
David Michael Roberts (Jan 12 2022 at 11:17):How technical is it? Is it, for instance, the sort of text she would use for her classes?
David Michael Roberts (Jan 12 2022 at 11:22):I guess I have only a vague picture of that, based on public statements and lectures she given. Maybe what I should ask instead is whether the book is based on her classes. I'm very curious to see it.
Ralph Sarkis (Jan 12 2022 at 11:58):Here is her take on the intended audience:
https://twitter.com/DrEugeniaCheng/status/1450102776533508097?s=20
@CaseFirefly Aww thanks! This one is the gentle category theory book - for people who want to learn category theory but don't have enough formal math background to read other category theory text books. Eg people whose degree is math-adjacent but not math, interested high school students...
- Dr Eugenia Cheng --no advice please-- (@DrEugeniaCheng) David Michael Roberts (Jan 12 2022 at 13:18):Ok, cool. That's (I think) what I was expecting. Will be very interesting!
Fawzi Hreiki (Jan 12 2022 at 13:50):She’s also already written a popular math book on category theory ‘How to Bake Pi’. So I imagine this will be a bit more advanced than that.
John Baez (Jan 12 2022 at 17:49):David Michael Roberts said:
How technical is it? Is it, for instance, the sort of text she would use for her classes?
Yes it probably is, so it's very nontechnical at first, and gradually builds up. (As you may know she teaches math at the Art Institute of Chicago, with a lot of students who come in saying they "hate math".)
John Baez (Jan 12 2022 at 17:55):It starts with 40 pages written mainly in English about the meaning of mathematics, abstraction, etc. Then it spends 40 pages on metrics, relations, metric spaces and equivalence relations. Then it brings in categories, isos, monos, epis, products, coproducts, pullbacks, pushouts, functors, natural transformations. By page 367 she has proved the Yoneda lemma, and then she spends 40 pages on higher categories.
John Baez (Jan 12 2022 at 17:56):She says, correctly, that while the book is long, people can read it at something more like the usual speed people are accustomed to reading, not the painfully slow way many math books demand, where we can take an hour or more to read a page.
John Baez (Jan 12 2022 at 18:01):It's not like any other math book I know. Which is exactly what I'd expect from her.