[TYPES] FW: Book on Category Theory

[Dimitrios Vytiniotis]

[FWD from Simon Dobson below] 

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Dobson [mailto:simoninireland at gmail.com] 
Sent: 25 October 2017 09:34
To: types-list at LISTS.SEAS.UPENN.EDU
Subject: Re: [TYPES] Book on Category Theory


On 24/10/2017 12:26, Gergely Buday wrote:

> The name catamorphism appears to have been chosen by Lambert Meertens [1].
> The category theoretic machinery behind these was resolved by Grant 
> Malcolm [2][3], and they were popularized by Meijer, Fokkinga and Paterson[4][5].
> The name comes from the Greek 'κατα-' meaning "downward or according 
> to". A useful mnemonic is to think of a catastrophe destroying something.

It's also worth noting that catamorphisms are closely related to the notion of map/reduce in high-performance computing. Although associated with Google, the idea first appears (as far as I'm aware) in the work of David Skillicorn:

David Skillicorn. Models for practical parallel computation.
International Journal of Parallel Programming" 20(2), pp. 133--158. 1991.

David Skillicorn. Architecture-independent parallel computation. IEEE Computer 23(12), pp. 38--50. January 1990.

There's also work by Bird and de Moor, building on that of Meertens. See in particular:

Richard Bird and Oege de Moor. Algebra of programming. Prentice Hall. 1997.

Cheers,


--
-- Simon