countedblessings

Category theory is so general in its application that it really feels like everyone, even non-mathematicians, ought to at least conceptually grok that it exists, like how everyone ought to understand the idea of the laws of physics even if they don't know what those laws are. We expect educated people to know that the Earth is round and the Sun is big, even though those facts don't have any direct relevance to the lives of most people. I think people should know about Yoneda and adjunction in at least the same broad way people are aware of the existence and use of calculus. But no one outside of mathematics and maybe programming/data science has heard of category theory, and I think a big part of that is because all of the examples in textbooks assume you already know what Sierpinski spaces and abelian groups are. That is to say: all expositions of category theory assume you know math. Which makes sense. Category theory is the mathematics of math. Trying to learn category theory without having most of an undergraduate education in math already under your belt is like trying to study Newton's laws without having ever seen an apple fall from a tree. You can...you're just going to have absolutely no intuition to rely on. Category theory generalizes the things you do in the various fields of mathematics, just like how Newton's laws generalize the things you do when you toss a rock or push yourself off the ground. Except really, category theory generalizes what you do when you generalize with Newton's laws. Category theory generalizes generalizing. Therefore, without knowing about any specific generalizations, like algebra or topology, it's hard to understand general generalities—which are categories. As a result, there are no category theory texts (that I know of) that teach category theory to the educated and intelligent but mathematically ignorant person. Which is a shame, because you totally can. Sure, if you've never learned topology, plenty of standard exa