Tag: mathematics
-
Book Review: “Combinators: A Centennial View” by Stephen Wolfram
In a landscape teeming with treatises on computation, Stephen Wolfram’s “Combinators: A Centennial View” emerges as a lustrous gem that elegantly straddles the line between art and science. Not only is it a visually captivating piece, but it also provides an insightful excavation into the foundational stratum of computational theory. As someone deeply involved in…
-
The Philosophy of Monads: From Leibniz to Lambda Calculus
“The present is big with the future…” Gottfried Leibniz – Principes de la nature et de la grâce This was written by the philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century. While he was not directly pondering the future of computing, his conceptual groundwork certainly appears prophetic when we consider the notion of “monads” in…
-
Introduction to Monads
Definition All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor. Categories for the Working Mathematician Or simplified: A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors Anonymous The second phrase…