ABSTRACT
M y service on the National Science Board brought me in active contact with the many problems of science policy, for instance, the period during which set theory was proposed as
a mathematics foundation for very young children-even those in kindergarten. This led to the story mentioned earlier, in which Johnny’s kindergarten teacher told his parents that Johnny really seemed to understand set theory, but he did have some difficulties writing those curly brackets. With this story in mind, and others, I often objected to the excessive use of sets. This was well before Lawvere had shown that category theory could be used as a foundation for mathematics as an alternate to sets (for an example of this, see Mac Lane/Moerdijk, 1996.) It all reminds me of my earlier attempts to persuade Bourbaki to use categories.
