Since we organized our own Category Theory reading group (CTRG) in the summer of 2019, I am keeping a watch on accessible resources for beginners to category theory. This wiki page collects some of them.
Reading Material
- Peter Smith maintains a curated list of resources, though I find it somewhat overwhelming.
- During our reading group, we shared thoughts about a couple of books.
I recently attended the ACT tutorial day 2020 and learned about the following relatively modern resources from David Spivak:
- Tai-Danae Bradley: [1809.05923] What is Applied Category Theory? (50 pages)
- Paolo Perrone: [1912.10642] Notes on Category Theory with examples from basic mathematics
- Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface | Bartosz Milewski's Programming Cafe (blog from which the book was derived)
- David Spivak and Brendan Fong: [1803.05316] Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory (textbook)
- David Spivak (short paper): [1409.6067] Categories as mathematical models (21 pages about modeling with category theory)
- John Baez: Some definitions everyone should know (6 pages of math definitions)
- Emily Riehl’s book: Category Theory in Context (more advanced textbook)
Videos
- Steve Awodey’s OPLSS 2012 lecture videos: Category theory foundations â Steve Awodey - YouTube
- ACT 2020 tutorial videos: ACT 2020 Tutorial: Introduction to Applied Category Theory (David Spivak) - YouTube
Community:
- The broader CT community has a Category Theory chat where discussion happens at all levels. It has grown over past few months so it seems public registration is now unavailable. Contact @kartik if you’d like to be added.
- Consider joining @CTRG for future updates and discussion. You can also email the group using ctrg@discuss.cs.uchicago.edu.
This is a wiki, please feel free to edit and improve.