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 changed “irreflexive graph” to “directed graph” (aka quiver), as such a presheaf is more commonly known. (Irreflexive to my mind means loops at a vertex are forbidden.)
’Irreflexive’ is admittedly potentially irritating. On the other hand, in the context of the gros-petit distinction where Lawvere uses this terminology it is not unreasonable as ’irreflexive’ graphs play second (derived&contrastive) fiddle to reflexive graphs there. He explicitly defends the terminology as ’appropriate’ in ’Qualitative distinctions’ (1989, p.272).
In my view, the nlab should have in principle a consistent terminology for the categories but should also be able to give a meaningful search result for ’irreflexive graphs’ be that a redirect link or a footnote with a caveat insofar Lawvere’s usage collides with established terminology in graph theory.
I put in a parenthetical comment that Lawvere calls them irreflexive graphs, which might suffice for a search result internal to the nLab, but please feel free to do more if you feel it is warranted, so long as “directed graphs” and “quivers” remain.
I am not able to access page 272 from Google books, and I was denied access to the article which is hosted by the wordpress blog Conceptual Mathematics as I am not a member of that blog; I guess it’s now by invitation only. So I can’t really comment on Lawvere’s use of language.
That’s fine with me. Thanks for enhancing the readability of the entry!
I brought the Lawvere paper up mainly because I thought that you might be interested in his point of view. He writes there:
Its actions are the irreflexive graphs (the negative is in a way appropriate even for those objects which happen to have loops at some point p, for morphisms are allowed to interchange any two such loops). (Lawvere 1989, p.272)
In a context where one contrasts the petit topos of graphs with the gros it is a natural choice. In a more general situation one might indeed prefer other terms.
I’m not convinced that any of these comments argue meaningfully for the terminology “irreflexive” as applied to these objects.
étendue had
iff all morphisms in are monic. For monoids this amounts to being cancellative: implies and includes all free monoids.
in which the implication appears to have had the order of the factors accidentally wrong (since monoids are not usually assumed commutative by default, and since the fact that is the base category here seems not to make that right; the sentence was about ); simply deleted the implication and made a link to left cancellative category, and slightly reworded.
Seems like a good call – thanks.
1 to 8 of 8