English

Logic and linear algebra: an introduction

Logic 2017-01-05 v3 Logic in Computer Science Category Theory

Abstract

We give an introduction to logic tailored for algebraists, explaining how proofs in linear logic can be viewed as algorithms for constructing morphisms in symmetric closed monoidal categories with additional structure. This is made explicit by showing how to represent proofs in linear logic as linear maps between vector spaces. The interesting part of this vector space semantics is based on the cofree cocommutative coalgebra of Sweedler.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.2650,
  title  = {Logic and linear algebra: an introduction},
  author = {Daniel Murfet},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.2650},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

v2: the article has been substantially rewritten to improve the exposition, some false statements about cut-elimination were corrected, a new section about second-order linear logic was added, and the material on geometry of interaction has been removed (to be published elsewhere), v3: fixed typos, added references

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:00:06.520Z