11 Categories

    This chapter contains some elementary material about categories, functors, and natural transformations. Notably, we discuss and explore:

    1. 1.

      Categories (Section 11.1).

    2. 2.

      Examples of categories (Section 11.2).

  • 3.

    The quadruple adjunction $\pi _{0}\dashv {(-)_{\mathsf{disc}}}\dashv \operatorname {\mathrm{Obj}}\dashv {(-)_{\mathsf{indisc}}}$ between the category of categories and the category of sets (Section 11.3).

  • 4.

    Groupoids, categories in which all morphisms admit inverses (Section 11.4).

  • 5.

    Functors (Section 11.5).

  • 6.

    The conditions one may impose on functors in decreasing order of importance:

    1. (a)

      Section 11.6 introduces the foundationally important conditions one may impose on functors, such as faithfulness, conservativity, essential surjectivity, etc.

    2. (b)

      Section 11.7 introduces more conditions one may impose on functors that are still important but less omni-present than those of Section 11.6, such as being dominant, being a monomorphism, being pseudomonic, etc.

    3. (c)

      Section 11.8 introduces some rather rare or uncommon conditions one may impose on functors that are nevertheless still useful to explicit record in this chapter.

  • 7.

    Natural transformations (Section 11.9).

  • 8.

    The various categorical and 2-categorical structures formed by categories, functors, and natural transformations (Section 11.10).

  • This chapter is under active revision. TODO:

    • Fix categories having an underlying set of objects by having them have an underlying setoid of objects (not necessarily by definition, as that’ll likely be bothersome; at least Section 11.3 should be fixed and several remarks should be added at several points). Related: Warning 11.3.1.1.2


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