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.