Applied Category Theory for Engineering

Teaser video: why category theory for engineering?

Work-in progress textbook

A friendly and extensive introduction to applied category theory, with a focus on engineering perspectives and applications. Work-in-progress by Andrea Censi, Jonathan Lorand, and Gioele Zardini.

Teaching

Since several years we have been teaching applied category theory for engineering at ETH Zurich. Our audience is graduate students in a wide range of engineering disciplines, as well as students from computer science and applied mathematics. Currently we are teaching an introductory lecture in the fall semesters, and a more advanced and somewhat specialized lecture in the spring semesters.
In the fall of 2024 Gioele will be teaching a version of the introductory course at MIT. In 2021 we also taught a free, online course in applied category theory for a broad international audience, and aim to offer a similar course sometime in the future.

Events

At regular intervals we co-organize events on applied category theory for engineering. Recently, for example, several workshops on “Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools” and on “Co-design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems”. See here for more information and materials.

Co-design of complex systems: from autonomy to future mobility

Talk by Gioele Zardini for the Topos Insitute Colloquium.

Design everything (,) together

Talk on co-design by Andrea Censi at the MIT categories seminar. (Slides here)

Learn co-design

• A concise categorical formalization of monotone co-design is given in Chapter 4 of “An Introduction to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality“.
• co-design.science contains more materials.
• Gioele Zardini’s Ph.D. Thesis

Original papers by Andrea Censi, before discovering category theory:

• Censi, Andrea. “A mathematical theory of co-design“, 2015. (slides)
• Censi, Andrea. “A class of co-design problems with cyclic constraints and their solution“, 2016.
• Censi, Andrea. “Uncertainty in Monotone Co-design Problems“, 2017.

Publications

• Andrea Censi on google scholar
• Jonathan Lorand on google scholar
• Gioele Zardini’s publications page