I seem to remember reading once a story that some mathematician had written to justify the use of categories, or isomorphisms or equivalences, or something like that. The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, people did not know what equality was. Instead, they only thought about things up to isomorphism. For example, they did not say that two sets had the same number of elements, but that they were in bijection. Today with category theory go back to these roots.
Does anyone have an idea of who told this story and what the full story is?
Best Answer
This sounds an awful lot like TWF week 121: