Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:13:55 -0500 (EST) From: Michael Barr To: Thorsten Altenkirch , Subject: categories: Re: Where does the term monad come from? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Michael Barr Message-Id: Status: RO X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 3 I have told this story many times, but I guess one more can't hurt. Of course, it was originally used by Leibniz to describe the set of infintesimals surrounding an ordinary point. In the summer (or maybe late spring, the Oberwohlfach records will show this) of 1966, there was a category meeting there. It was, as far as I know, the third meeting ever devoted to categories. The first was the first Midwest Category meeting, an invitation affair that consisted of five people from Urbana (Jon Beck, John Gray, Alex Heller, Max Kelly, and me), John Isbell and Fred Linton visiting Chicago that year, and a couple people from U. Chicago, Mac Lane who was the host and arranged to pay our expenses, Dick Swan, and maybe a couple others. The second was in La Jolla and this was the third. The attendance consisted of practically everyone in the world who had any interest in categories, with the notable exception of Charles Ehresmann. What, with one exception, most categorists call monads had by that time been called "Standard constructions", "fundamental constructions" (in a little-known paper by Jean-Marie Maranda pointed out to me by Peter Huber), and, of course, "Triples". The latter was created by Eilenberg-Moore and I once asked Sammy (who was known to agonize over good terminology--e.g. "Exact") why. He answered that the concept seemed to be of little importance, so he and John Moore spent no time on it! So much for the predictive ability of a great mathematician. At any rate, the big unanswered question of the meeting, where the importance of the concept was becoming clear (Jon and I had proved our Acyclic models theorem, for example, and the fact of the triplebleness of compact Hausdorff spaces over sets, along with many mor familiar examples), the search was on for a better name. We tried many ideas (mine was "Standard Natural Algebraic Functor with Unit" (try the acronym). One day at lunch or dinner I happened to be sitting next to Jean Benabou and he turned to me and said something like "How about `monad'?" I thought about and said it sounded pretty good to me. (Yes, I did.) So Jean proposed it to the general audience and there was general agreement. It suggested "monoid" of course and it is a monoid in a functor category. The one dissenter was Jon Beck, who had invested as much into studying them as anyone. His argument was that while "triples" was not a good name, "monad" wasn't either and we shouldn't change the name from a poor one to a mediocre one, but instead continue to search for a better one. Out of solidarity with Jon (we collaborated on several papers), I continued to use "triple". SLN 80 was (and is) known as the "Zurich Triples Book". By 1980, Jon was no longer doing serious mathematics and I was ready to change. Except that the book title "Toposes, Triples and Theories" was too attactive to let go of. Try "Toposes, Monads and Theories".