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June 4, 2018

Applied Category Theory: Resource Theories

Posted by John Baez

My course on applied category theory is continuing! After a two-week break where the students did exercises, I went back to lecturing about Fong and Spivak’s book Seven Sketches. The second chapter is about ‘resource theories’.

Resource theories help us answer questions like this:

  1. Given what I have, is it possible to get what I want?
  2. Given what I have, how much will it cost to get what I want?
  3. Given what I have, how long will it take to get what I want?
  4. Given what I have, what is the set of ways to get what I want?

Resource theories in their modern form were arguably born in these papers:

We are lucky to have Tobias in our course, helping the discussions along! He’s already posted some articles on resource theory on the Azimuth blog:

In the course, we had fun bouncing between the relatively abstract world of monoidal preorders and their very concrete real-world applications to chemistry, scheduling, manufacturing and other topics. Here are the lectures:

Posted at June 4, 2018 6:21 PM UTC

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