You're reading the public-facing archive of the Category Theory Zulip server.
To join the server you need an invite. Anybody can get an invite by contacting Matteo Capucci at name dot surname at gmail dot com.
For all things related to this archive refer to the same person.
Patrick Nicodemus (Jan 08 2024 at 18:20):Wikipedia claims that Peter May named operads in part because his mother was an opera singer. Is this apocryphal or is there any evidence for it?
Patrick Nicodemus (Jan 08 2024 at 18:25):I think this is bs but a colleague of mine who is a homotopy theorist claims it is true.
Mike Shulman (Jan 08 2024 at 18:33):I was a grad student of Peter May and he never said anything of the sort in my hearing.
Mike Shulman (Jan 08 2024 at 18:33):He always said the "oper" was for "operations".
Mike Shulman (Jan 08 2024 at 18:34):What is your colleague's source?
Patrick Nicodemus (Jan 08 2024 at 19:00):He was a PhD student of Mona Merling at Penn and he says she told him this. Mona was a student of May.
Todd Trimble (Jan 08 2024 at 22:01):Never heard that, and really, Wikipedia?
Peter May here says this:
The name “operad” is a word that I coined myself, spending a week thinking about nothing else. Besides having a nice ring to it, the name is meant to bring to mind both operations and monads. Incidentally, I persuaded MacLane to discard the term “triple” in favor of “monad” in his book “Categories for the working mathematician” [17]1, which was being written about the same time. I was convinced that the notion of an operad was an important one, and I wanted the names to mesh.
This is also the source given by Wikipedia, and no source seems to be given for the opera singer story. If Wikipedia is unable to source it, then that should be edited, no matter how fun it sounds.
John Baez (Jan 08 2024 at 22:02):Mike Shulman said:
I was a grad student of Peter May and he never said anything of the sort in my hearing.
Peter May told me the name 'operad' was in honor of his mother. But also remember his Thursday November 9th 2023 comment on the category theory mailing list:
Excerpt from my memorial address for Saunders MacLane, about events around 1971 or 1972:
There is a terminological comment in Categories for the Working Mathematician that I especially like and would like to share with you. It concerns the substitution of monad for triple as the name of a concept that all mathematicians here should know. He writes “The frequent but unfortunate use of the word ‘triple’ in this sense has achieved a maximum of needless confusion, what with the conflict with ordered triple, plus the use of associated terms such as ‘triple derived functors’ for functors which are not three times derived from anything in the world. Hence the term ‘monad’.” One reason I like this passage is that it is a beautiful illustration of the vividness of his writing, his sheer verve. Another is that it is so characteristic of his manner of arguing a point. But the third is personal. In the first draft he used the word triple, and I won him over. I had just defined operads, and I had coined that word to go well with monad.
Given all this, I believe the main reason for the name operad was that 'operad' is a blend of 'operation' and 'monad'; the opera business seems like an additional amusing twist, added on either at the time or later.
Todd Trimble (Jan 16 2024 at 02:14):Well, it's quite true that whenever you say "operadic", someone will misunderstand and think you said "operatic".