A five day conference on category theory and it applications in memory of Saunders Mac Lane will be held on April 7--April 11, 2006 at the University of Chicago. Its themes will be: 1. The influence of the work of Saunders Mac Lane, 2. The current status of category theory, 3. Recent applications of category theory. The third theme will be the primary mathematical focus. There is much interesting work in category theory going on in other countries that is little known in the United States. Several leading foreign experts will participate. The conference will highlight recent work aimed directly at applications in differential geometry (and hence to mathematical physics) and in algebraic topology.
The conference will in large part be a memorial tribute to Mac Lane, who was one of the most influential American mathematicians and died last year at age 95. He spent most of his career at Chicago. Mac Lane and his collaborator Eilenberg created the subject of category theory. Mac Lane was interested both in the internal development of category theory and in its development with a view towards applications in other areas of mathematics. The conference at Chicago will help make manifest how these are intertwined and will heighten the visibility of the subject. This is something that MacLane greatly desired in his lifetime. More information can be found on the conference homepage www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/MACLANE/
