One of the most abstract fields in math finds application in the 'real' world
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350567/description/One_of_the_most_abstract_fields_in_math_finds_application_in_the_real_world
One of the most abstract fields in math finds application in the 'real' world
By Julie Rehmeyer
Web edition: May 20, 2013
Every pure mathematician has experienced that awkward moment when asked, So whats your research good for? There are standard responses: a proud Nothing!; an explanation that mathematical research is an art form like, say, Olympic gymnastics (with a much smaller audience); or a stammered response that so much of pure math has ended up finding application that maybe, perhaps, someday, it will turn out to be useful.
That last possibility is now proving itself to be dramatically true in the case of category theory, perhaps the most abstract area in all of mathematics. Where math is an abstraction of the real world, category theory is an abstraction of mathematics: It describes the architectural structure of any mathematical field, independent of the specific kind of mathematical object being considered. Yet somehow, what is in a sense the purest of all pure math is now being used to describe areas throughout the sciences and beyond, in computer science, quantum physics, biology, music, linguistics and philosophy.
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David Spivak of MIT has perhaps the boldest vision for category theorys potential. In a paper posted February 27 on arXiv.org, he argues that all scientific thought can be expressed in a structured way using category theory. Both ideas and the data supporting them can be encoded in the universal language of category theory, allowing scientists to present a database with their full work. Spivak even imagines a Facebook-like interface with peoples full thoughts and experiences presented in a category theoretic database that would connect people whose databases overlap.
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Via
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/05/in_the_news.html