#976 overall
18.S097 Applied Category Theory
MIT OpenCourseWare
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2019 · score 0.7
An MIT OpenCourseWare January IAP course introducing applied category theory, with lectures and three problem sets of varying difficulty. It covers categories, functors, and monoids in categories, applied to programming-related ideas.
Commenters suggest browsing its assignments to judge fit, and one notes it is the course to take if you want to understand the famous 'monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors' joke.
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What I usually do, and also did here, to evaluate if a course interests me is to look at some of the assignments.
Here they present three PDFs with a number of assignments of varying difficulty: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied-cate...
If you find that being able to answer a high enough number of assignments you know that the course is for you. If not, the lectures may still be of interest, but it is much less likely the less of the assignments you think are worthwhile for you.
PS: Question 4 in problem set 3 is quite (in)famous :-) Just the headline:
So, if you want to be one of the few people who actually understand that sentence when it is quoted as a joke (usually in programming forum whenever monads come up), this is your course.