UCalgary Peripatetic Seminar: David Spivak

The category of polynomial functors in one variable and natural transformations between them is incredibly rich, e.g. it has infinitely many monoidal closed structures, including cartesian closure. Its substitution comonoids are categories and the associated double category includes multivariate polynomials as a full sub-doublecategory. Applications of polynomial functors include Moore and Mealy machines, data migration, algebraic datatypes, and much more. In this talk, I’ll explain whatever I know that is of interest in this circle of ideas.