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Aaron, https://wiki.haskell.org/Catamorphisms writes: The name catamorphism appears to have been chosen by Lambert Meertens [1]. The category theoretic machinery behind these was resolved by Grant Malcolm [2][3], and they were popularized by Meijer, Fokkinga and Paterson[4][5]. The name comes from the Greek 'κατα-' meaning "downward or according to". A useful mnemonic is to think of a catastrophe destroying something. 1. L. Meertens. First Steps towards the theory of Rose Trees. Draft Report, CWI, Amsterdam, 1987. 2. G. Malcolm. PhD. Thesis. University of Gronigen, 1990. 3. G. Malcolm. Data structures and program transformation. Science of Computer Programming, 14:255--279, 1990. 4. E. Meijer. Calculating Compilers, Ph.D Thesis, Utrecht State University, 1992. 5. E. Meijer, M. Fokkinga, R. Paterson, Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire, 5th ACM Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture. 6. T. Uustalu, V. Vene. Coding Recursion a la Mendler. Proceedings 2nd Workshop on Generic Programming, WGP'2000, Ponte de Lima, Portugal, 6 July 2000 7. T. Uustalu, V. Vene, A. Pardo. Recursion schemes from Comonads. Nordic Journal of Computing. Volume 8 , Issue 3 (Fall 2001). 366--390, 2001 ISSN:1236-6064 8. E. Kmett. Catamorphism. The Comonad.Reader, 2008. I hope this helps. - Gergely