Mac Lane memorial conference: first announcement


There will be a conference on category theory and its
applications in memory of Saunders Mac Lane, April 7
through April 11, 2006, at the University of Chicago.

The opening event will be a memorial service, or more
accurately a celebration of Mac Lane's life, on the
morning of April 7.  A number of Mac Lane's students,
colleagues, collaborators, and friends will speak
during the conference, including Steve Awodey (his
last student), Peter Freyd, Andre Joyal, Peter
Johnstone, William Lawvere, and Peter May.

The mathematical focus will be on recent applications
of category theory. The conference will be held in
conjunction with the 2006 Unni Namboodiri Lectures,
which will be given by John Baez on the afternoons of
April 7, 10, and 11, under the general title:
``Higher category theory, higher gauge theory''.

As MacLane's book ``Categories for the working mathematician''
emphasized, he was interested both in the internal development
of category theory and in its development with a view towards
applications in other areas of mathematics.  The conference
will highlight recent work that introduces new category theory
aimed directly at applications in differential geometry (and
hence to mathematical physics) and in algebraic topology.
As Saunders would have liked, most of the speakers will be
young mathematicians actively engaged in just such research.

A web page at the address
http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/MacLane
with fuller details will be posted shortly.