This is a brief little post about naming. Naming is well-known to be one of the hardest problems in computer science. But why is this the case? I claim that one of the reasons is because often naming systems are being asked to do triple-duty; a single name is used to perform the three functions of reference, identity, and display. What does this mean? Consider a group of people. Each person has a name. However, these names may not be unique. If I want to refer to a person, I might say somethi...| Topos Institute
At last week’s Topos Colloquium, Rory Lucyshyn-Wright told us about categories graded by a monoidal category, following his recent preprint (Lucyshyn-Wright 2025). Graded categories, short for locally graded categories, were first introduced by Richard Wood under a different name (Wood 1976, 1978). Graded categories are of mathematical interest because they simultaneously generalize actions of a monoidal category (“actegories”) and, via a Yoneda-type embedding, enriched categories, whil...| Topos Institute
We’re pushing out a major release comprising our CatColab work over the last quarter. If you’re just tuning in to the project, see my first blog post on the topic. This is an alpha release, that is, CatColab is still experimental software with many features on the roadmap. However, we now have a more full-featured user-accessible database for storing, saving, and sharing your models, and we intend to migrate your data along with all future updates. Therefore, from today, we think CatColab...| Topos Institute