Maths - Free and Forgetful Functors

Free and forgetful functors add and remove structure in the most extreme way. Adding or removing some structure requires some choices but these functors depend only on the category that we are working in.

A free foo happens to be the simplest thing that satisfies all of the 'foo' laws. That is to say it satisfies exactly the laws necessary to be a foo and nothing extra.

 

 

 

 


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see also:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13352205/what-are-free-monads

Correspondence about this page

Book Shop - Further reading.

Where I can, I have put links to Amazon for books that are relevant to the subject, click on the appropriate country flag to get more details of the book or to buy it from them.

flag flag flag flag flag flag The Princeton Companion to Mathematics - This is a big book that attempts to give a wide overview of the whole of mathematics, inevitably there are many things missing, but it gives a good insight into the history, concepts, branches, theorems and wider perspective of mathematics. It is well written and, if you are interested in maths, this is the type of book where you can open a page at random and find something interesting to read. To some extent it can be used as a reference book, although it doesn't have tables of formula for trig functions and so on, but where it is most useful is when you want to read about various topics to find out which topics are interesting and relevant to you.

 

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