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The-Clowder-Project / the-clowder-project

This is the repository for the Clowder project, an online collaborative resource for category theory and mathematics in general
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Terminology: distributors #9

Open topological-modular-forms opened 5 months ago

topological-modular-forms commented 5 months ago

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.

topological-modular-forms commented 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.