I also have this book, adorning my book shelf. This is all that is does- adorn the shelf. First, in order to have any comprehension of this text, you need to have a firm grasp of abstract algebra, (group theory, ring theory, etc. etc) type theory (Ben Peirce’s book in the classic) with a sprinkling of category theory. So, you must spend months and months in advanced graduate mathematics and computer science so that you can just begin to do the proofs in the class.

Are your eyes glazing over yet?

I know enough about this stuff to firmly assert that I know nothing about this stuff.

I think this is the trendy version of having Donald Knuth’s classic ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ on your book shelf.

As BPMS’rs I think we should not loose site of the benefit of Pi-Calculus. This is a field of formal methods and formal methods has benefited computer science in many ways. For instance, Java’s strongly typed language is an offspring of formal methods. The benefit to us is more powerful abstractions and more powerful abstractions lead to less coding.

Tom