Network Theory (Part 31)

Last time we came up with a category of labelled graphs and described circuits as ‘cospans’ in this category.

Cospans may sound scary, but they’re not. A cospan is just a diagram consisting of an object with two morphisms going into it:

We can talk about cospans in any category. A cospan is an abstract way of thinking about a ‘chunk of stuff’ with two ‘ends’ and It could be any sort of stuff: a set, a graph, an electrical circuit, a network of any kind, or even a piece of matter (in some mat...