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May 14, 2021

Structure vs. Observation

Posted by Emily Riehl

guest post by Stelios Tsampas and Amin Karamlou

Today we’ll be talking about the theory of universal algebra, and its less well-known counterpart of universal coalgebra. We’ll try to convince you that these two frameworks provide us with suitable tools for studying a fundamental duality that arises between structure and behaviour. Rather than jumping straight into the mathematical details we’ll start with a few motivating examples that arise in the setting of functional programming. We’ll talk more about the mathematics at play behind the scenes in the second half of this post.

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