Readers wanted!

tl;dr: Read a draft of my thesis and send me your feedback by September 9!

Over the past year I’ve had several people say things along the lines of, “let me know if you want me to read through your thesis”. I never took them all that seriously (it’s easy to say you are willing to read a 200-page document…), but it never hurts to ask, right?

My thesis defense is scheduled for October 14, and I’m currently undertaking a massive writing/editing push to try to get as much of it wrapped up as I can before classes start on September 4. So, if there’s anyone out there actually interested in reading a draft and giving feedback, now is your chance!

The basic idea of my dissertation is to put combinatorial species and related variants (including a port of the theory to HoTT) in a common categorical framework, and then be able to use them for working with/talking about data types. If you’re brave enough to read it, you’ll find lots of category theory and type theory, and very little code—but I can promise lots of examples and pretty pictures. I’ve tried to make it somewhat self-contained, so it may be a good way to learn a bit of category theory or homotopy type theory, if you’ve been curious to learn more about those topics.

You can find the latest draft here (auto-updated every time I commit); more generally, you can find the git repo here. If you notice any typos or grammatical errors, feel free to open a pull request. For anything more substantial—thoughts on the organization, notes or questions about things you found confusing, suggestions for improvement, pointers to other references—please send me an email (first initial last name at gmail). And finally, please send me any feedback by September 9 at the latest (but the earlier the better). I need to have a final version to my committee by September 23.

Last but not least, if you’re interested to read it but don’t have the time or inclination to provide feedback on a draft, never fear—I’ll post an announcement when the final version is ready for your perusal!