TypeSig Talks: Anton Lorenzen and John Baez

Yesterday was our very first TypeSig Talks event!

Our first speaker was Anton Lorenzen, who gave a talk on in-place functional programming, allowing a compiler to generate code for balancing trees (and otherdata structure manipulations) as efficient as a C implementation, wihle still having all the nice properties of an implementation in a strongly-typed functional language (Koka).

After pizza and mingling, John Baez gave a talk on applied category theory. This talk covered: the general concept of applied category theory; its history (arising from Lawvere’s functorial semantics and quantum physics’ Feynmann diagrams); work done by people in his group and elsewhere over the past two decades; the stock-flow tooling that his colleagues have been working on recently; and a new project he’s leading in the Fields Institute on applying category theory to help model human responses to climate change.

We’re proud to have had such a successful first talk run entirely by ourselves, and hope that you all join us for next week’s talk by Phil Wadler!