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Seven dogmas of
category theory
Posted on 6 June 2013 by John

Joseph Goguen gave seven dogmas in his paper A Categorical

Manifesto.

1. To each species of mathematical structure, there

corresponds a category whose objects have that
structure, and whose morphisms preserve it.
2. To any natural construction on structures of one species,
yielding structures of another species, there corresponds a
functor from the category of the first species to the
category of the second.
3. To each natural translation from a construction F : A -> B
to a construction G: A -> B there corresponds a natural
transformation F => G.
4. A diagram D in a category C can be seen as a system of
constraints, and then a limit of D represents all possible
 solutions of the system.
5. To any canonical construction from one species of
structure to another corresponds an adjuction between
the corresponding categories.
6. Given a species of structure, say widgets, then the result of
interconnecting a system of widgets to form a super-
widget corresponds to taking the colimit of the diagram
of widgets in which the morphisms show how they are
interconnected.
7. Given a species of structure C, then a species of structure
obtained by “decorating” or “enriching” that of C
corresponds to a comma category under C (or under a
functor from C).

Although category theory is all about general patterns, it can be

hard to learn what the general patterns of category theory are.
The list above is the best high-level description of category
theory I’ve seen.

Related: Applied category theory

Categories : Math

Tags : Category theory Math

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