Saunders Mac Lane was an extraordinary mathematician, a dedicated teacher, and a good citizen who cared deeply about the values of science and education. In his autobiography, he gives us a glimpse of his "life and times," mixing the highly personal with professional observations. His recollections bring to life a century of extraordinary accomplis

Categories for the Working Mathematician provides an array of general ideas useful in a wide variety of fields. Starting from the foundations, this book illuminates the concepts of category, functor, natural transformation, and duality. The book then turns to adjoint functors, which provide a description of universal constructions, an analysis of the representations of functors by sets of morphisms, and a means of manipulating direct and inverse limits. These categorical concepts are extensively illustrated in the remaining chapters, which include many applications of the basic existence theorem for adjoint functors. The categories of algebraic systems are constructed from certain adjoint-like data and characterized by Beck's theorem. After considering a variety of applications, the book continues with the construction and exploitation of Kan extensions. This second edition includes a number of revisions and additions, including two new chapters on topics of active interest. One is onsymmetric monoidal categories and braided monoidal categories and the coherence theorems for them. The second describes 2-categories and the higher dimensional categories which have recently come into prominence. The bibliography has also been expanded to cover some of the many other recent advances concerning categories.

This book presents modern algebra from first principles and is accessible to undergraduates or graduates. It combines standard materials and necessary algebraic manipulations with general concepts that clarify meaning and importance. This conceptual approach to algebra starts with a description of algebraic structures by means of axioms chosen to suit the examples, for instance, axioms for groups, rings, fields, lattices, and vector spaces. This axiomatic approach—emphasized by Hilbert and developed in Germany by Noether, Artin, Van der Waerden, et al., in the 1920s—was popularized for the graduate level in the 1940s and 1950s to some degree by the authors' publication of A Survey of Modern Algebra. The present book presents the developments from that time to the first printing of this book. This third edition includes corrections made by the authors.

This classic, written by two young instructors who became giants in their field, has shaped the understanding of modern algebra for generations of mathematicians and remains a valuable reference and text for self study and college courses.