Marta Bunge's Thesis Republished

 

On Monday 4th November 2024 Professor Marta Bunge's 1966 PhD thesis Categories of set valued functors was published  in  Reprints in Theory and Applications of Categories (TAC), No. 30 (2024) pp. 1-8 http://www.tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/articles/30/tr30.pdf. Category Theory is traditionally a small branch of Mathematics and a reprint in TAC is an important accomplishment in our community.

Together with TAC's Volume 40 - Bunge Festschrift* and the donation of Marta's Library to USP, SP in Brazil, this completes a multi-year project that hoped to showcase the achievements of Prof. Bunge in a very male-oriented environment. 

Marta was a good friend and, like many women I know, one that did not believe very much in the impact of her own work. When I first told her that I wanted to get a special volume of TAC dedicated to the whole of her oeuvre, the first thing she said was that she was not sure she deserved it. But of course she did and many members of our category theory community wanted to celebrate her work. Thus it was nice to be able to see the volume 40 of TAC, celebrating her work. Especially nice to see the remembrances of Marta from Prof Andrée C. Ehresmann and from Prof Silvia Bunge, her daughter.

Maria Manuel Clementino, Jonathon Funk (one of her earlier PhD students) and I had the pleasure of editing the volume. Many thanks Maria Manuel and Jonathon!

It was very sad that a few months after we started thinking about the festschrift, Marta fell ill and did not live to see the volume in her honour. She died on 25 October 2022. I've asked mathematicians about other ways of celebrating her work and Nathanael Arkor suggested producing an online version of her original PhD thesis from 1966. Prof Michael Barr and Pam Freyd, as well as Silvia and Eric Bunge worked  hard to get a copy of the thesis from which Nathanael could work, and very soon Nathanael had a first version of the reprint done. This needed some support from editors of TAC to be accepted and Maria Manuel and Matias Menni were happy to lend their support to the project. Geoff Crutwell (as managing editor of TAC) was always very supportive, so the thesis has just been reissued as a TAC reprint.

This kind of completes a cycle, started  in 2013 when Marta was my Ada Lovelace hero. Then I think I called Marta 'Doyenne' of the women category theorists. But Andrée C. Ehresmann corrected me, as she started before Marta (in any case Andrée was Ada Lovelace hero 2023, a bit late, I'm afraid). I wanted to thank again all the collaborators mentioned here, as well as all the authors and reviewers of the special volume for their help in this project. But I especially want to thank Silvia and Eric Bunge for their donation of Marta's books to the Dept of Mathematics of USP in Brazil. This will make a huge difference to many people!

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(I really need to write more in this blog, but somehow it seems harder and harder.)