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Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

• Created.

• Created page, copying material from the one on David Roberts’ web.

• Page created, but author did not leave any comments.

Anonymous

• Added a section on terminology.

Can we say exactly what kind of pretopos the category of small presheaves on a category C is?

Is it a ΠW-pretopos, provided that PC is complete?

• redirect

• a bare sub-section with a list of references – to be !included into relevant entries – mainly at confinement and at mass gap problem (where this list already used to live)

• for completeness

• some minimum, just so that I can link to it

• starting some minimum, for the moment mostly to have a place for collecting references

• I added a reference to an early talk on Yoneda structures in which Walters advertizes them as a 2-dimensional version of the category of categories.

• Page created, but author did not leave any comments.

• Started this having heard someone mention it.

• a stub, just so that the link works

• while bringing some more structure into the section-outline at comma category I noticed the following old discussion there, which hereby I am moving from there to here:

[begin forwarded discussion]

+–{.query} It's a very natural notation, as it generalises the notation $(x,y)$ (or $[x,y]$ as is now more common) for a hom-set. But personally, I like $(f \rightarrow g)$ (or $(f \searrow g)$ if you want to differentiate from a cocomma category, but that seems an unlikely confusion), as it is a category of arrows from $f$ to $g$. —Toby Bartels

Mike: Perhaps. I never write $(x,y)$ for a hom-set, only $A(x,y)$ or $hom_A(x,y)$ where $A$ is the category involved, and this is also the common practice in nearly all mathematics I have read. I have seen $[x,y]$ for an internal-hom object in a closed monoidal category, and for a hom-set in a homotopy category, but not for a hom-set in an arbitrary category.

I would be okay with calling the comma category (or more generally the comma object) $E(f,g)$ or $hom_E(f,g)$ if you are considering it as a discrete fibration from $A$ to $B$. But if you are considering it as a category in its own right, I think that such notation is confusing. I don’t mind the arrow notations, but I prefer $(f/g)$ as less visually distracting, and evidently a generalization of the common notation $C/x$ for a slice category.

Toby: Well, I never stick ‘$E$’ in there unless necessary to avoid ambiguity. I agree that the slice-generalising notation is also good. I'll use it too, but I edited the text to not denigrate the hom-set generalising notation so much.

Mike: The main reason I don’t like unadorned $(f,g)$ for either comma objects or hom-sets is that it’s already such an overloaded notation. My first thought when I see $(f,g)$ in a category is that we have $f:X\to A$ and $g:X\to B$ and we’re talking about the pair $(f,g):X\to A\times B$ — surely also a natural generalization of the very well-established notation for ordered pairs.

Toby: The notation $(f/g/h)$ for a double comma object makes me like $(f \to g \to h)$ even more!

Mike: I’d rather avoid using $\to$ in the name of an object; talking about projections $p:(f\to g)\to A$ looks a good deal more confusing to me than $p:(f/g)\to A$.

Toby: I can handle that, but after thinking about it more, I've realised that the arrow doesn't really work. If $f, g: A \to B$, then $f \to g$ ought to be the set of transformations between them. (Or $f \Rightarrow g$, but you can't keep that decoration up.)

Mike: Let me summarize this discussion so far, and try to get some other people into it. So far the only argument I have heard in favor of the notation $(f,g)$ is that it generalizes a notation for hom-sets. In my experience that notation for hom-sets is rare-to-nonexistent, nor do I like it as a notation for hom-sets: for one thing it doesn’t indicate the category in question, and for another it looks like an ordered pair. The notation $(f,g)$ for a comma category also looks like an ordered pair, which it isn’t. I also don’t think that a comma category is very much like a hom-set; it happens to be a hom-set when the domains of $f$ and $g$ are the point, but in general it seems to me that a more natural notion of hom-set between functors is a set of natural transformations. It’s really the fibers of the comma category, considered as a fibration from $C$ to $D$, that are hom-sets. Finally, I don’t think the notation $(f,g)$ scales well to double comma objects; we could write $(f,g,h)$ but it is now even less like a hom-set.

Urs: to be frank, I used it without thinking much about it. Which of the other two is your favorite? By the way, Kashiwara-Schapira use $M[C\stackrel{f}{\to} E \stackrel{g}{\leftarrow} D]$. Maybe $comma[C\stackrel{f}{\to} E \stackrel{g}{\leftarrow} D]$? Lengthy, but at least unambiguous. Or maybe ${}_f {E^I}_g$?

Zoran Skoda: $(f/g)$ or $(f\downarrow g)$ are the only two standard notations nowdays, I think the original $(f,g)$ which was done for typographical reasons in archaic period is abandonded by the LaTeX era. $(f/g)$ is more popular among practical mathematicians, and special cases, like when $g = id_D$) and $(f\downarrow g)$ among category experts…other possibilities for notation should be avoided I think.

Urs: sounds good. I’ll try to stick to $(f/g)$ then.

Mike: There are many category theorists who write $(f/g)$, including (in my experience) most Australians. I prefer $(f/g)$ myself, although I occasionally write $(f\downarrow g)$ if I’m talking to someone who I worry might be confused by $(f/g)$.

Urs: recently in a talk when an over-category appeared as $C/a$ somebody in the audience asked: “What’s that quotient?”. But $(C/a)$ already looks different. And of course the proper $(Id_C/const_a)$ even more so.

Anyway, that just to say: i like $(f/g)$, find it less cumbersome than $(f\downarrow g)$ and apologize for having written $(f,g)$ so often.

Toby: I find $(f \downarrow g)$ more self explanatory, but $(f/g)$ is cool. $(f,g)$ was reasonable, but we now have better options.

=–

• stub for confinement, but nothing much there yet. Just wanted to record the last references there somewhere.

• a stub, to satisfy links

• fixed spelling of the word constraint (one instance) in paragraph under ### Gravity as a (non-)gauge theory

cofo

• Add missing separation condition that Stone uses in his proof. Explain why it’s necessary.

• removed typo

• Fixed a link to point to his departmental ’profile’.

• Mention that Hausdorff is not required in the first Michael theorem (almost all standard sources, including Michael himself, impose it).