From quantum groupoids to functional programming
2018-09-30
Reading the beautiful book Functional Programming in Scala by Paul Chiusano and Runar Bjarnason, I recently stumbled over unexpected links between
- quantum groupoids, my former area of research pure mathematics, and
- functional programming, relevant to my future work.
Both areas share important concepts from category theory, which may not be too much of a surprise: the latter was invented as a language to speak about repeating patterns that occur in many areas of mathematics. In the next few posts, I will try to outline these connections, and review the necessary basics from category theory.
The moral? Although a lot of things I learned seem to loose relevance when moving to a new career, you never know what some day they will turn out to be good for.
What is a category?