Category Theory and Structuralism
نویسنده
چکیده
The term structuralism occurred in several branches of the humanities and the sciences in the period 1929 – 1970: in Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson), Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), Developmental psychology (Jean Piaget), Literature (Workshop for potential literature, Raymond Queneau) and in Mathematics (Nicolas Bourbaki). To the layman the structuralist movement in mathematics was perhaps most visible the form of New Math, which was strongly influenced by the Bourbaki school. It has been argued in (Aubin 1997) that there were cultural connections between these movements. (See also A. Aczel 2007.) Some of these interactions may be regarded as rather superficial. The epistemologist Piaget however was very much influenced by Bourbaki, and seems to have suggested that those patterns of thought used to explain cognitive development were closely related to the mathematical “mother structures” found by Bourbaki.
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