Colin McLarty

Colin McLarty

Colin McLarty is an American logician whose publications have ranged widely in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, as well as in the history of science and of mathematics.

Research

Figure 1. Colin McLarty is a researcher in categories and toposes.

McLarty's Elementary Categories and Elementary Toposes describes category theory and topos theory at an elementary level.^[1]

He has written papers about Saunders Mac Lane, one of the founders of category theory.

He is a member of the Grothendieck Circle, which provides on-line and open access to many writings about the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, whose category-theoretic genius revolutionized Banach-space theory and algebraic geometry and whose life has fascinated many biographers and mathematical scientists.^[2]

McLarty has also written about the German algebraist, Emmy Noether, who was a Jewish woman, and her involvement with German political history.^[3]

Case Western Reserve University

Positions

At Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Colin McLarty is the Truman P. Handy Professor of Philosophy and a previous Chair of the Philosophy Department.

At CWRU, he is also a professor of mathematics.

Bibliography

• McLarty, Colin (1992). Elementary Categories, Elementary Toposes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853392-6.
• Colin McLarty, The Uses and Abuses of the History of Topos Theory, Brit. J. Phil. Sci, 41 (1990) p 355.
• Colin McLarty, 'Emmy Noether’s ‘Set Theoretic’ Topology: From Dedekind to the rise of functors' in The Architecture of Modern Mathematics: Essays in history and philosophy (edited by Jeremy Gray and José Ferreirós), Oxford University Press (2006) p. 211–35.
• McLarty, Colin, 2005, "Saunders Mac Lane (1909–2005): His Mathematical Life and Philosophical Works," Philosophia Mathematica 13: 237–51. With selected bibliography emphasizing Mac Lane's philosophical writings.
• --------, 2007, "The Last Mathematician from Hilbert's Göttingen: Saunders Mac Lane as Philosopher of Mathematics,", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58(1): 77–112.

See also

• "Abstract nonsense", a (usually ironic) term for category theory and category-theoretic arguments in homological algebra
• "Generalized abstract nonsense", an ironic and affectionate term for topos theory
• Other topos theorists (besides Saunders Mac Lane):
  • Martin Hyland
  • Peter Johnstone
  • William Lawvere

References

1. • Elementary Categories, Elementary Toposes.
2. website of the Grothendieck Circle.
3. Journal History of Mathematics.

External links

• Personal website of Colin McLarty
• CWRU website of Colin McLarty
• Grothendieck Circle, which lists McLarty as a member. (A collection of mathematical and biographical information, photos, links about Alexander Grothendieck.)
• Colin McLarty at the Mathematics Genealogy Project