Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
I happened to look at the old entry duality again and found it a bit thin.
So I have expanded it a bit now. This is not meant to be definite, please feel invited to further expand and/or fine-tune:
Instances of “dualities” relating two different, maybe opposing, but to some extent equivalent concepts or phenomena are ubiquitous in mathematics (and in mathematical physics, see at dualities in physics).
In terms of general abstract concepts in category theory instances of dualities might be (and have been) organized as follows:
abstract duality – the operation of sending a category to its opposite category is such an involution on Cat itself (and in fact this is the only non-trivial automorphism of Cat, see here). This has been called abstract dualty. While the construction is a priori tautologous, any given opposite category often is equivalent to a category known by other means, which makes abstract duality interesting.
concrete duality – given a closed category and any object of it, then the operation obtained by forming the internal hom into sends each object to something like a a -dual object. This is particularly so if is indeed a dualizing object in a closed category in that applying this operation twice yields an equivalence of categories (so that is a (contravariant) involution on ). If is in addition a closed monoidal category then under some conditions on (but not in general) this kind of concrete dualization coincides with the concept of forming dual objects in monoidal categories.
From (Lawvere-Rosebrugh, chapter 7)):
Not every statement will be taken into its formal dual by the process of dualizing with respect to , and indeed a large part of the study of mathematics
space vs. quantity
and of logic
theory vs. example
may be considered as the detailed study of the extent to which formal duality and concrete duality into a favorite correspond or fail to correspond. (p. 122)
left and right Kan extension
existential quantification and universal quantification
(Given that the saying has it that “Everything in mathematics is a Kan extension”, this goes some way in explaining the ubiquity of duality in mathematics.)
When the adjoint functors are monads and hence modalities, then adjointness between them has been argued to specifically express the concept of duality of opposites.
Adjunctions and specifically dual adjunctions (“Galois connection”) may be thought of as a generalized version of the above abstract duality: every dual adjunction induces a maximal dual equivalence between subcategories.
Great to have more added, in view of that workshop I mentioned.
The adjunction duality is not really different from the abstract duality under involution. A limit in is a colimit in , etc.
Let’s see, how should we phrase it. Having an adjoint pair is different from identifying a ctegory with an opposite category, though of course passing to opposites interchanges left and right adjoints.
When you say ‘having an adjoint pair’, you don't mean a pair of adjoint functors but a pair of adjunctions, right? So an example would be . You would want to call anything like this a duality?
Right, i suppose i didn’t say it well. Let’s try to improve. Right now i am sort of offline though.
added pointer to:
added pointer to:
1 to 8 of 8