Categories and Groupoids

In 1968, when this book was written, categories had been around for 20 years and groupoids for twice as long. Category theory had by then become widely accepted as an essential tool in many parts of mathematics and a number of books on the subject had appeared, or were about to appear (e.g. [13, 22, 37, 58, 65]). By contrast, the use of groupoids was confined to a small number of pioneering articles, notably by Ehresmann [12] and Mackey [57], which were largely ignored by the mathematical community. Indeed groupoids were generally considered at that time not to be a subject for serious study. It was argued by several well-known mathematicians that group theory sufficed for all situations where groupoids might be used, since a connected groupoid could be reduced to a group and a set. Curiously, this argument, which makes no appeal to elegance, was not applied to vector spaces: it was well known that the analogous reduction in this case is not canonical, and so is not available, when there is extra structure, even such simple structure as an endomorphism. Recently, Corfield in [41] has discussed methodological issues in mathematics with this topic, the resistance to the notion of groupoids, as a prime example. My book was intended chiefly as an attempt to reverse this general assessment of the time by presenting applications of groupoids to group theory