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[FWD from Simon Dobson below] -----Original Message----- From: Simon Dobson [mailto:simoninirel...@gmail.com] Sent: 25 October 2017 09:34 To: types-list@LISTS.SEAS.UPENN.EDU Subject: Re: [TYPES] Book on Category Theory On 24/10/2017 12:26, Gergely Buday wrote: > 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. It's also worth noting that catamorphisms are closely related to the notion of map/reduce in high-performance computing. Although associated with Google, the idea first appears (as far as I'm aware) in the work of David Skillicorn: David Skillicorn. Models for practical parallel computation. International Journal of Parallel Programming" 20(2), pp. 133--158. 1991. David Skillicorn. Architecture-independent parallel computation. IEEE Computer 23(12), pp. 38--50. January 1990. There's also work by Bird and de Moor, building on that of Meertens. See in particular: Richard Bird and Oege de Moor. Algebra of programming. Prentice Hall. 1997. Cheers, -- -- Simon
