Categories Great and Small by Bartosz Milewski.
From the post:
You can get real appreciation for categories by studying a variety of examples. Categories come in all shapes and sizes and often pop up in unexpected places. We’ll start with something really simple.
No ObjectsThe most trivial category is one with zero objects and, consequently, zero morphisms. It’s a very sad category by itself, but it may be important in the context of other categories, for instance, in the category of all categories (yes, there is one). If you think that an empty set makes sense, then why not an empty category?
Simple GraphsYou can build categories just by connecting objects with arrows. You can imagine starting with any directed graph and making it into a category by simply adding more arrows. First, add an identity arrow at each node. Then, for any two arrows such that the end of one coincides with the beginning of the other (in other words, any two composable arrows), add a new arrow to serve as their composition. Every time you add a new arrow, you have to also consider its composition with any other arrow (except for the identity arrows) and itself. You usually end up with infinitely many arrows, but that’s okay.
Another way of looking at this process is that you’re creating a category, which has an object for every node in the graph, and all possible chains of composable graph edges as morphisms. (You may even consider identity morphisms as special cases of chains of length zero.)
Such a category is called a free category generated by a given graph. It’s an example of a free construction, a process of completing a given structure by extending it with a minimum number of items to satisfy its laws (here, the laws of a category). We’ll see more examples of it in the future.
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The latest installment in literate explanation of category theory in this series.
Challenges await you at the end of this post.
Enjoy!