Thursday
May272010
Tech Talk: Categories are Databases
Galois, Inc.Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public. Please join us!IMPORTANT: Please note that this talk is Thursday.
- title:
- Categories are Databases (slides, video)
- presenter:
- Dr. David Spivak
- time:
- 10:30 am, 03 June 2010, Thursday
- location:
- Galois Inc.421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, OR, USA(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)
- abstract:
- Category theory is a powerful language for organizing layers of abstraction in all areas of mathematics. Databases are powerful tools for organizing information of all sorts. Whereas categories are often considered hopelessly abstract, databases are often considered horrifically mundane. Thus it is either strange or fitting that, mathematically speaking, categories and databases are the same concept. In this talk I'll show how to turn any database into a category and any category into a database. I'll also discuss functors and how they may be useful for issues of data migration and merging.
- bio:
- David Spivak graduated with a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2007; his thesis used higher category theory to fix an old problem in geometry. From 2007 to the present, he have been a postdoc at the University of Oregon in the Math Department. During this time, his focus has moved toward the idea of using category theory to understand information and communication. This summer, he will become a mathematics postdoc at MIT for three years, focusing on information and communication from a category-theoretic perspective.
Reader Comments (4)
The video for this talk is now available at: http://vimeo.com/12428370
Is there a way to download the video?
It runs very slowly in a Flash player in my SeaMonkey browser when I have dozens of other tabs open simultaneously. I would rather open the video in a separate application.
[...] are Categories 2010-09-08 // 0 In May, Dr. Spivak gave a talk at galois on databases and categories, which inspired the Ministry’s current research into category-schemas. Categories [...]
Anyone interested in talking about or implementing "databases = categories" should contact me. I am very interested in moving forward with this and in collaboration generally.