Applied Category Theory Course: Resource Theories

After a two-week break where the students did exercises, I’m back to lecturing about Fong and Spivak’s book Seven Sketches. Now we’re talking about “resource theories”. Resource theories help us answer questions like this:

1. Given what I have, is it possible to get what I want?
2. Given what I have, how much will it cost to get what I want?
3. Given what I have, how long will it take to get what I want?
4. Given what I have, what is the set of ways to get what I want?

Resource theories in their modern form were arguably born in these papers:

• Bob Coecke, Tobias Fritz and Robert W. Spekkens, A mathematical theory of resources.

• Tobias Fritz, Resource convertibility and ordered commutative monoids.

We are lucky to have Tobias in our course, helping the discussions along! He’s already posted some articles on resource theory here on this blog:

• Tobias Fritz, Resource convertibility (part 1), Azimuth, 7 April 2015.

• Tobias Fritz, Resource convertibility (part 2), Azimuth, 10 April 2015.

• Tobias Fritz, Resource convertibility (part 3), Azimuth, 13 April 2015.

We’re having fun bouncing between the relatively abstract world of monoidal preorders and their very concrete real-world applications to chemistry, scheduling, manufacturing and other topics. Here are the lectures so far:

• Lecture 18 – Chapter 2: Resource Theories • Lecture 19 – Chapter 2: Chemistry and Scheduling • Lecture 20 – Chapter 2: Manufacturing • Lecture 21 – Chapter 2: Monoidal Preorders • Lecture 22 – Chapter 2: Symmetric Monoidal Preorders