The Center Leo Apostel
                 **********************

in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB, invites 
everybody to the 18th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the series 
Foundations. In this series CLEA invites scholars that are actively 
engaged in the research on the foundations of a particular discipline. 
Their lectures will always be directed  to an interdisciplinary 
audience, and the discussions aim at confronting the foundations of 
the different disciplines.


        The history and importance of Category Theory
        *********************************************

                     by Jiri Rosicky
                     ***************

          (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)


         Tuesday, 22 April 1997 at 5 p.m. in room B215
        Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Campus Oefenplein .


About the lecture:  
+++++++++++++++++
  
Category theory was established by S.Eilenberg and S.MacLane in 1945. 
Nowadays, after 50 years of development, its concepts and results are 
used in many fields of mathematics. The basic idea of the theory of 
categories is to consider mathematical objects together with their 
interconnections, i.e. with structure preserving transformations among 
them (they are called morphisms). It has turned out that this global 
point of view naturally explains many constructions typical for a 
given class of objects.
The lecture will offer the historical development of category theory 
and its main contributions. The explanation is going to be non-
technical and our main example of a category will be the category of 
sets: here, objects are sets and morphisms are maps. Among others, we 
will mention a connection between Categories, Logic and Computation 
and we will introduce the concept of a Topos.

About the speaker :
+++++++++++++++++

Dr. Jiri Rosicky graduated in Mathematics at Masaryk University (1968) 
and received his Phd.in 1972. He is Associated Professor at the 
Department of Algebra and Geometry, Masaryk University (since 1972). 
He is full Professor since 1986 and head of the Department of Algebra 
and Geometry. His research orietation is category theory and its 
connections with algebra, topology, model theory and computer 
science.He has more than 70 publications in scientific journals, a 
monograph Locally Presentable and Accessible Categories (together with 
J.Adamek), Cambridge Univ. Press 1994. He gave lectures at many 
international conferences and at more than 30 universities.He has been 
visiting professor at York University, Canada (1987, 1991) and at 
Universite Catholique Louvain-La-Neuve (1989, 1995 and 1997). He is 
the editor-in-chief of the journal Archivum Mathematicum (Brno) and an 
editor of Theory and Applications of Categories.

The presentations with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards, 
an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the 
topic. 

More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the Web-page: 
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/