[Math] History of the pullback corner notation

ct.category-theoryho.history-overviewnotationpullback

Where/when did the convention originate of marking pullback (and/or pushout) squares by that little right-angle symbol in the corner?

Pair of pullback squares; from Spivak, Category Theory for the Sciences; fair use for illustrative purposes of the use of this notation in the literature

The earliest instance I’ve been able to find is in Paul Taylor’s diagrams package, from ≤1994, as mentioned in e.g. the changelog notes for v3.81 at http://www.paultaylor.eu/diagrams/ . But it seems more likely that this was to meet the demand for a notation that was already established, rather than being the origin? But looking at various well-known category theory textbooks from before 2000 (Mac Lane Categories for the Working Mathematician; Mac Lane and Moerdijk Sheaves in Geometry and Logic; Borceux Handbook of Categorical Algebra; Johnstone Topos Theory), none of them seem to use it, as far as I can find.

Best Answer

In an email to me dated 17 February 1992, Peter Freyd said:

I was using a different notation in 1974 in lectures at Montreal. A high school teacher named Butler suggested the right-angle. It was an improvement. I have used it since.

When the diagram gets too complicated for the pullbacks to be rectangles, such as in the final chapter of my book Practical Foundations of Mathematics, I strongly recommend making them at least parallelograms. Then it is clear that pullback is acting as a functor that transforms one part of the diagram to another. In particular, in a type-theoretic setting pullback is substitution; whilst this has been known for a long time, Section 8.2 of the book actually proves it.

William Butler (had) proved some important results about monads, which you will find in "Toposes, Triples and Theories" by Barr and Wells (free TAC reprints copy).

Other very smart categorists who left academia to become schoolteachers include Christian Mikkelsen (who was the first to derive colimits from limits in an elementary topos) and Sjoerd Crans (who did weak higher dimensional category theory).