Logic Matters 2008-06-12

Awodey's Category Theory: Ch. 2

The second chapter of Awodey's book is called 'Abstract Structures'. It gives the usual abstract category-theoretic definitions of epis and monos, of sections and retractions, of initial and terminal objects, of products, and so on. This would certainly be tough going if it was the first time you'd ever encountered these notions. Even as revision/consolidation it's a bit of a bumpy ride. But for all that, I did get a fair bit out the chapter (Awodey's clusters of illustrative examples can be very illuminating).One query. In the sections on products, Awodey starts carefully, talking of a product as an object together with a pair of arrows, and rightly referring to A x B as part of a product. And mostly what he says about products reflects this understanding of what products are. But on p. 42 he says that any ...

read more   

more posts from Logic Matters