No Arabic abstract
These are lecture notes for a 1-semester undergraduate course (in computer science, mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry or biology) in applied categorical meta-language. The only necessary background for comprehensive reading of these notes are first-year calculus and linear algebra.
Parallel transport of a connection in a smooth fibre bundle yields a functor from the path groupoid of the base manifold into a category that describes the fibres of the bundle. We characterize functors obtained like this by two notions we introduce: local trivializations and smooth descent data. This provides a way to substitute categories of functors for categories of smooth fibre bundles with connection. We indicate that this concept can be generalized to connections in categorified bundles, and how this generalization improves the understanding of higher dimensional parallel transport.
We give an elementary and direct combinatorial definition of opetopes in terms of trees, well-suited for graphical manipulation and explicit computation. To relate our definition to the classical definition, we recast the Baez-Dolan slice construction for operads in terms of polynomial monads: our opetopes appear naturally as types for polynomial monads obtained by iterating the Baez-Dolan construction, starting with the trivial monad. We show that our notion of opetope agrees with Leinsters. Next we observe a suspension operation for opetopes, and define a notion of stable opetopes. Stable opetopes form a least fixpoint for the Baez-Dolan construction. A final section is devoted to example computations, and indicates also how the calculus of opetopes is well-suited for machine implementation.
We prove that a quasi-bialgebra admits a preantipode if and only if the associated free quasi-Hopf bimodule functor is Frobenius, if and only if the relative (opmonoidal) monad is a Hopf monad. The same results hold in particular for a bialgebra, tightening the connection between Hopf and Frobenius properties.
It is known that the Grothendieck group of the category of Schur functors is the ring of symmetric functions. This ring has a rich structure, much of which is encapsulated in the fact that it is a plethory: a monoid in the category of birings with its substitution monoidal structure. We show that similarly the category of Schur functors is a 2-plethory, which descends to give the plethory structure on symmetric functions. Thus, much of the structure of symmetric functions exists at a higher level in the category of Schur functors.
For two DG-categories A and B we define the notion of a spherical Morita quasi-functor A -> B. We construct its associated autoequivalences: the twist T of D(B) and the co-twist F of D(A). We give powerful sufficiency criteria for a quasi-functor to be spherical and for the twists associated to a collection of spherical quasi-functors to braid. Using the framework of DG-enhanced triangulated categories, we translate all of the above to Fourier-Mukai transforms between the derived categories of algebraic varieties. This is a broad generalisation of the results on spherical objects in [ST01] and on spherical functors in [Ann07]. In fact, this paper replaces [Ann07], which has a fatal gap in the proof of its main theorem. Though conceptually correct, the proof was impossible to fix within the framework of triangulated categories.