One of the most influential math figures of the past century just died. He was known for his work in Algebraic Theories, Algebraic Categories, Topos Theory, Philosophy, Logic, Physics, Didactic, Computer Science, History, and Anthropology.
>Talking with Bill, I often feel like a fly buzzing around a cow. (It seems to me I can liken Bill to a cow, if I’m just a fly myself.) On any easy question, I’ll probably see the answer first. But his thoughts seem to move on a level where I don’t function, I can barely see down there.
—John Isbell
>It is my belief that in the next decade and in the next century the technical advances forged by category theorists will be of value to dialectical philosophy, lending precise form with disputable mathematical models to ancient philosophical distinctions such as general vs. particular, objective vs. subjective, being vs. becoming, space vs. quantity, equality vs. difference, quantitative vs. qualitative etc. In turn the explicit attention by mathematicians to such philosophical questions is necessary to achieve the goal of making mathematics (and hence other sciences) more widely learnable and useable. Of course this will require that philosophers learn mathematics and that mathematicians learn philosophy
—William Lawvere