juan_gandhi | is not it hilarious

The Giry monad was originally developed by Lawvere in 1962, prior to the recognition of the explicit relationship between monads and adjunctions. It wasn’t until 1965 that the constructions of Eilenberg-Moore, and Kleisi, showed that every adjoint pair gives rise to a monad.

Lawvere’s construction was written up as an appendix to a proposal to the International Atomic Energy Commission. At that time, Lawvere was working for a “think tank’‘ in California, and the purpose of the proposal was to provide a means for verifying compliance with limitations on nuclear weapons. In the 1980’s, Giry was collaborating with another French mathematician at that time who was also working with the French intelligence agency, and was able to obtain a copy of the appendix. Giry then developed and extended some of the ideas in the appendix.