About

Welcome to the The Joy of Abstraction book club! The Joy of Abstraction, by Eugenia Cheng, is an introduction to category theory for anyone who wants to get into the formality of the subject but does not necessarily have the mathematical background to read a standard textbook. Part 1 starts gently, so that readers can build up to the formality of rigorous mathematics even if they haven't encountered it before. Part 2 gets into formal rigorous category theory, including limits and colimits, duality, functors, natural transformations, and the Yoneda lemma.

Dr Cheng wanted to give people an opportunity to ask questions and get help with understanding the book. This book club was run asynchronously, at an approximate rate of one chapter per week and readers invited to submit questions for each chapter according to a published schedule. We then collated the questions and Dr Cheng made a video each week addressing the questions for that chapter. The questions were kept anonymous, and we welcomed any question that comes from you wanting to understand something more!

Dr Cheng maintains a webpage recording errata for The Joy of Abstraction here.

To create a sense of community, even amongst those who may not frequently have questions, we encourage anyone following along with this book club to add their name to our public list of participants using this form.