3 ms·

> The mathematical terminology harkens back to the 1950 Does it? The earliest instances I can find are in Mac Lane's 1971 book or thereabouts; the older term w

• ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
  That's an interesting reference...
• notagoodidea 6y ago
  In fact since the Pythagoreans [1] where the monad comes first and after the dyad and after the numbers and so on. It also was the term for unicellular organism before this was coined. Monadic was an adjective used in logic before the 20th century, using the noun dervied by the greek root monas which gave monad and monadic (and the same with dyad, dyadic). If I take for right what is on the french [2] and english pages [3] of wikipedia about the terminology history of the monad words its usages seems to date to around the 70 when Saunders Mac Lane named it in reference to the philosophical term. I feels some times people tend to forget how interconnected is and was mathematics and philosophy and how term from philosophy were used in a mathematical context based on their philosophical definition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(philosophy) [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monade_(th%C3%A9orie_des_cat%C3%A9gories) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monade_(th%C3%A9orie_des_cat%C... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(category_theory)#Terminological_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(category_theory)#Termin...