Peter Smith

@neoliberalaf Yes, at its level it is a good book.

@PeterSmith Hello Mr. Smith, your introductions are superb. Can you also recommend Tarski's World: Revised and Expanded from Barwise, Etchemendy, and Barker?

ICYMI elsewhere. There's a pbk version of *Introducing Category Theory*, 3rd edn. new today, ISBN 1068346728. Amazon-only print on demand to keep the price minimal. Or you can still download the PDF from logicmatters.net/categories (more info there). Spread the word :)

A new blog post about using AI in proofreading the upcoming revised 2nd edition of my category theory book. Might be of some interest to other maths writers. logicmatters.net/2025/12/28/ai-…

@ae_stallings @katherineveritt Poetic, but to use a mathematical technicality, bollocks.

@katherineveritt Ooo! I'm not sure I understand it, but it sounds poetic.

The fact that ∅⊂∅ (the void set is a subset of the void set) is such a beautiful demonstration of the cascading of ontological difference from total emptiness, a seed of the difference from utter indifference. Simply, even the void contains multitudes. 😮‍💨

@daisyldixon You should have tried (one-time Cambridge hero) Jonathan Bennett’s *Kant’s Analytic” instead! The only history of modern phil book I kept when I retired…

remembering the time when I was a first year undergrad and had an hour to kill in the library so I just thought cool I’ll read some Kant, opened a Critique and couldn’t get past the first page so I had a small quiet cry instead

ICYMI elsewhere. There's now a pbk version of *Introducing Category Theory*, 2nd edn., ISBN 1068346701. Amazon-only print on demand to keep the price minimal for a 500pp book. Or you can still download the PDF from logicmatters.net/categories (more info there). Spread the word :)

@JohnMacIntyre2 Not @PeterSmith though ….

Last week my mentor, my friend, and my hero left us. It's taken me some time to gather my thoughts to be able to express them. Professor @PeterSmith passed away and the world is diminished without him. It's difficult to describe him; a powerful intellect, a rock 'n roller who

Or if you just want something a bit more substantial then e.g. Eugenia Cheng's book but less challenging than e.g. Tom Leinster's, this might hit the spot in between. Enjoy, as they say!

The table of contents and the Preface will give you a good idea whether this will be of any interest to you. But if, for example, you are about to start an industrial-strength category theory course, this could provide a gentle warm-up.

New online today -- an almost complete draft for a second edition of *Introducing Category Theory*. Cheapo pbk to come in Feb/March (in the meantime, all corrections VERY welcome as my proof-reading is probably terrible!). You can download it from logicmatters.net/categories

Three short-ish blog posts so far on Noson Yanofsky’s new book on Monoidal Category Theory at logicmatters.net/blog

Day 15 of my futile one-woman crusade to keep real images popping up on your feed rather than AI. Autumnal archway in Clent, Worcestershire. The end of autumn is often my favourite, when the colours are at their most intense 🧡

@keithfrankish Gosh, the state of the replies ….!

Do you find it plausible that we can gain insight into the fundamental nature of reality simply by reflecting on our own minds?

@Susanne_Bobzien Thanks! — and I’ll look forward a lot to seeing the HPL paper. :)

@PeterSmith Again, I think Jamie Tappenden would agree that in the Begriffsschrift Frege draws more extensively on mathematics rather than on philosophy (including the Stoics), cf. his fn. 2 in the HPL paper. Thanks again for your link. (5/5)

#Frege scholars: HPL has just published a very nice historical paper by #JamieTappenden about Frege''s social interaction with others: mathematicians, scientists, philosophers. And despite its title, I promise it really has nothing much to do with me. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

@Mark_Jago To my mind, “matrices” is so tied to mathematical contexts (linear algebra, graph theory, etc.) where such things can e.g. be multiplied, have eigenvalues, and whatnot, that the term should probably be avoided if all that is meant is a table.

@Mark_Jago None of the above … they are “many-valued truth-tables” ;). Or, if the number of values is given, a “three-valued truth-table” or whatever.

Logician friends: what do you call the many-valued version of truth-tables? #logic

Another Big Red Logic Book! There is, at last, a minimum-cost pbk of my intro notes on category theory — probably easier to work from than the 452 page PDF(!?), though that is still freely downloadable. Details at logicmatters.net/categories. Enjoy, as they say …

There is, at last, a full draft of my *Introducing Category Theory* notes, which can be freely downloaded. Enjoy, as they say. I’m not quite sure how I managed to write a 450 page book without really meaning to, but there you go … logicmatters.net/2024/07/01/int…