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Created exact square, but haven’t linked to it from anywhere else yet. I’m planning to move some of the discussion of exactness at derivator to its own page homotopy exact square, analogous to this one.
(Is the phrase “exact square” used for other things that we should worry about disambiguating/clarifying?)
A bit of History: The original idea of exact square (as so named) is I think in some work by Hilton in an Abelian category context. Guitart then studied them in a series of articles starting in 1980, and a discussion of various aspects of their use can be found in Cordier-Porter: Shape Theory, Dover 2008. I do not think there is another older source for the material than Guitart’s papers and no other concept is called that as far as I remember.
Interesting, thanks; why not add some of that to the page? (-:
I will when I get time! :-) The page is pretty good already. I have a plan to write up some older stuff on categorical shape theory including exact squares, then Batanin’s strong shape version of it and then to look at it from a nPOV. That is one plan. (There are others :-( !!!)
Sorry to be a bore, but what exactly is the natural transformation between? I assume it’s between the compositions of functors, but the way the diagram is drawn is misleading, and the wording is abstruse (inhabited by a natural transformation?).
“Inhabited” = filled-in. Seems okay to me.
I agree that the way the 2-cell is drawn makes the reader slow down for two seconds to verify there is no ambiguity (there isn’t: there’s only one way that diagram could be interpreted), and that slow-down isn’t necessary. I’m going to fix that.
For some reason I didn’t know that Instiki would accept \swArrow
. I’ll use that from now on; it’s definitely better to have the arrow going in that direction. (Although I think drawing the arrow as a the way I did originally is fairly common, especially in Australia, so it’s not a bad thing to get used to being able to parse when reading.)
The reason I didn’t know about \swArrow
is that \swArrow
doesn’t exist in my copy of the Comprehensive LaTeX Symbols List! There are a couple of packages listed with \Swarrow
, however, so I think I assumed that would be the command, tried it and it didn’t work, and assumed that itex didn’t know how to make a . Is \swArrow
taken from any actual LaTeX package? The capitalization seems to clash with \Rightarrow
etc.
Tom Hirschowitz has put a query on exact square. I will suggest that he copies it here as his office is only on the next floor downfrom where I am!
Hi, this is Tom doing as told, as Guest waiting for my account to be validated. Here is the query.
The criterion for exactness in the set-based setting seems wrong, one symptom being that it does not mention the 2-cell at all. If so, a few things below are probably also wrong. Here is a tentative corrected version (the math don’t look good, but I prefer to let them unchanged, as I’m copying them from the nlab query):
[…] the above condition means that, calling the given 2-cell, we have
For any morphism in , there exists an and morphisms and such that , and
For any and as above with , there is a zigzag of arrows connecting to and rendering the evident induced diagram commutative.
Hi Tom, welcome to the nForum! I think you’re absolutely right; that explicit version seems to only be correct in the special case when is an identity. Your version looks fine to me; want to fix the page?
Hi. Me again, after a few years.
I haven’t yet tried very hard, but I can’t see why the exactness condition is equivalent to being an iso. Would anyone have a reference or a hint, please?
I assume you are taking being an isomorphism as your definition. In that case, the two conditions are equivalent because adjunctions can be composed and adjoints are unique up to unique isomorphism: so and . (The only thing that really needs verifying is that the “unique isomorphism” induced by is indeed the given , but this can be checked using string diagrams or similar.)
Ah, right, thanks. Actually this seems to work by pure string diagram calculations.
Added an exact square characterization of adjointness. Also clarified that the exact square characterization of fully faithful functors is an if-and-only-if.
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