Open topological-modular-forms opened 5 months ago
DavKern writes:
Turns out the history is actually the other around; he introduced them as profunctors and then preferred the term distributors. Amusingly, in the notes https://www2.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~streicher/FIBR/DiWo.pdf, while he doesn't talk much about distributions, he motivates profunctors by analogy with the {t,f}-enriched version in the introduction.
It seems Bénabou named profunctors "distributors" after the analogy with distributions.
I should probably add a terminology note for this in the chapter on profunctors.