I've tried a few times to learn category theory in the abstract, and struggled to motivate myself when I couldn't clearly "see" the structure and the application, in categories (like Hask or Vect) which I know reasonably well.
I'm glad it exists though, so I know where to look if I want some kind of deeper unifying intuition about structural ideas in whatever area of maths I'm studying, which might help me connect them to other areas, and as I read more graduate-level maths I imagine more of these opportunities will crop up.
Perhaps it's one of those things where it's helpful to learn the basic definitions early on, and their implications in categories (initially probably fairly straightforward ones) which you already know.
But then, just keep it gently percolating while you study other things, rather than trying to force it and make sense of adjoint functors etc before you've studied enough applications to justify the abstraction.
I've tried a few times to learn category theory in the abstract, and struggled to motivate myself when I couldn't clearly "see" the structure and the application, in categories (like Hask or Vect) which I know reasonably well.
I'm glad it exists though, so I know where to look if I want some kind of deeper unifying intuition about structural ideas in whatever area of maths I'm studying, which might help me connect them to other areas, and as I read more graduate-level maths I imagine more of these opportunities will crop up.
Perhaps it's one of those things where it's helpful to learn the basic definitions early on, and their implications in categories (initially probably fairly straightforward ones) which you already know.
But then, just keep it gently percolating while you study other things, rather than trying to force it and make sense of adjoint functors etc before you've studied enough applications to justify the abstraction.