In a bicategory of spans (an example of a 'generic bicategory') the factorization of a span (s,t) as the span (s,1) followed by (1,t) satisfies a simple universal property with respect to all factorizations in terms of the generic bicategory structure. Here we show that this universal property can in fact be used to characterize bicategories of spans. This characterization of spans is very different from the others in that it does not mention any adjointness conditions within the bicategory.
The notion of cartesian bicategory, introduced by Carboni and Walters for locally ordered bicategories, is extended to general bicategories. It is shown that a cartesian bicategory is a symmetric monoidal bicategory.
This paper studies the Euler characteristic of a bicategory based on the concept of magnitudes introduced by Leinster. We focus on its invariance with respect to biequivalence and on the product formula for Buckley's fibered bicategories.
We study the interaction between the notions of filteredness, fractions and fibrations in the theory of bicategories, generalizing classical results for categories. We give an explicit formula for filtered pseudo-colimits of categories indexed by a bicategory, and we use it to compute the hom-categories of a bicategory of fractions. As a consequence, we show that the canonical pseudo-functor into a bicategory of fractions is exact.
A compact closed bicategory is a symmetric monoidal bicategory where every object is equipped with a weak dual. The unit and counit satisfy the usual "zig-zag" identities of a compact closed category only up to natural isomorphism, and the isomorphism is subject to a coherence law. We give several examples of compact closed bicategories, then review previous work. In particular, Day and Street defined compact closed bicategories indirectly via Gray monoids and then appealed to a coherence theorem to extend the concept to bicategories; we restate the definition directly. We prove that given a 2…
We make a few remarks concerning pointwise extensions in a bicategory which include the case of bicategories of enriched categories. We show that extensions, pointwise or not, can be replaced by extensions along very special fully faithful maps. This leads us to suggest a concept of limit sketch internal to the bicategory.
A detailed description of internal bicategory in the category of groups is derived from the general description of internal bicategories in weakly Mal'tsev sesquicategories. The example of bicategory of paths in a topological abelian group is presented, as well as a description of internal bicategories in weakly Mal'tsev categories with a $V$-Mal'tsev operation in the sense of Pedicchio.
We treat the problem of lifting bicategories into double categories through categories of vertical morphisms. We make use of a specific instance of the Grothendieck construction to provide, for every bicategory equipped with a possible vertical category, together with a suitable monoidal pre-cosheaf relating these two structures, a double category lifting the decorated bicategory along the category of vertical morphisms provided as set of initial conditions. We prove in particular that every decorated bicategory admits a lift to a double category. We study relations of instances of our constru…
We fix any bicategory $\mathscr{A}$ together with a class of morphisms $\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}$, such that there is a bicategory of fractions $\mathscr{A}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}^{-1}]$. Given another such pair $(\mathscr{B},\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{B}})$ and any pseudofunctor $\mathcal{F}:\mathscr{A}\rightarrow\mathscr{B}$, we find necessary and sufficient conditions in order to have an induced equivalence of bicategories from $\mathscr{A}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}^{-1}]$ to $\mathscr{B}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{B}}^{-1}]$. In particular, this gives necessary and sufficient conditions in order to h…
We establish the universal properties of the bicategory of polynomials, considering both cartesian and general morphisms between these polynomials. A direct proof of these universal properties would be impractical due to the complicated coherence conditions arising from polynomial composition; however, in this paper we avoid most of these coherence conditions using the properties of generic bicategories. In addition, we give a new proof of the universal properties of the bicategory of spans, and also establish the universal properties of the bicategory of spans with invertible 2-cells; showing…
We introduce the notion of a relative pseudomonad, which generalises the notion of a pseudomonad, and define the Kleisli bicategory associated to a relative pseudomonad. We then present an efficient method to define pseudomonas on the Kleisli bicategory of a relative pseudomonad. The results are applied to define several pseudomonads on the bicategory of profunctors in an homogeneous way, thus providing a uniform approach to the definition of bicategories that are of interest in operad theory, mathematical logic, and theoretical computer science.
It is well known that to give an oplax functor of bicategories $\mathbf{1}\to\mathscr{C}$ is to give a comonad in $\mathscr{C}$. Here we generalize this fact, replacing the terminal bicategory by any bicategory $\mathscr{A}$ for which the composition functor admits generic factorisations. We call bicategories with this property generic, and show that for generic bicategories $\mathscr{A}$ one may express the data of an oplax functor $\mathscr{A}\to\mathscr{C}$ much like the data of a comonad; the main advantage of this description being that it does not directly involve composition in $\mathsc…
This paper adresses two issues in dealing with bicategories of fractions. The first is to introduce a set of conditions on a class of arrows in a bicategory which is weaker than the one given in Pronk, Etendues and stacks as bicategories of fractions, but still allows a bicalculus of fractions. These conditions allow us to invert a smaller collection of arrows so that in some cases we may obtain a bicategory of fractions with small hom-categories. We adapt the construction of the bicategory of fractions to work with the weaker conditions. The second issue is the difficulty in dealing with 2-ce…
We give a formal concept of (right) wide Morita context between two 0-cells in arbitrary bicategory. We then construct a new bicategory with the same 0-cells as the oldest one, and with 1-cells all these (right) wide Morita contexts. An application to the (right) Eilenberg-Moore bicategory of comonads associated to the bimodules bicategory is also given.
We describe a Cat-valued nerve of bicategories, which associates to every bicategory a simplicial object in Cat, called the 2-nerve. We define a 2-category NHom whose objects are bicategories and whose 1-cells are normal homomorphisms of bicategories, in such a way that the 2-nerve construction becomes a full embedding of NHom in the 2-category of simplicial objects in Cat. This embedding has a left biadjoint, and we characterize its image. The 2-nerve of a bicategory is always a weak 2-category in the sense of Tamsamani, and we show that NHom is biequivalent to a certain 2-category whose obje…
We develop bicategory theory in univalent foundations. Guided by the notion of univalence for (1-)categories studied by Ahrens, Kapulkin, and Shulman, we define and study univalent bicategories. To construct examples of univalent bicategories in a modular fashion, we develop displayed bicategories, an analog of displayed 1-categories introduced by Ahrens and Lumsdaine. We demonstrate the applicability of this notion, and prove that several bicategories of interest are univalent. Among these are the bicategory of univalent categories with families and the bicategory of pseudofunctors between un…
This paper proves three different coherence theorems for symmetric monoidal bicategories. First, we show that in a free symmetric monoidal bicategory every diagram of 2-cells commutes. Second, we show that this implies that the free symmetric monoidal bicategory on one object is equivalent, as a symmetric monoidal bicategory, to the discrete symmetric monoidal bicategory given by the disjoint union of the symmetric groups. Third, we show that every symmetric monoidal bicategory is equivalent to a strict one. We give two topological applications of these coherence results. First, we show that t…
We give the definitions of model bicategory and $q$-homotopy, which are natural generalizations of the notions of model category and homotopy to the context of bicategories. For any model bicategory $\mathcal{C}$, denote by $\mathcal{C}_{fc}$ the full sub-bicategory of the fibrant-cofibrant objects. We prove that the 2-dimensional localization of $\mathcal{C}$ at the weak equivalences can be computed as a bicategory $\mathcal{H}o(\mathcal{C})$ whose objects and arrows are those of $\mathcal{C}_{fc}$ and whose 2-cells are classes of $q$-homotopies up to an equivalence relation. When considered …
We fix any bicategory $\mathscr{A}$ together with a class of morphisms $\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}$, such that there is a bicategory of fractions $\mathscr{A}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}^{-1}]$. Given another such pair $(\mathscr{B},\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{B}})$ and any pseudofunctor $\mathcal{F}:\mathscr{A}\rightarrow\mathscr{B}$, we find necessary and sufficient conditions in order to have an induced pseudofunctor $\mathcal{G}:\mathscr{A}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{A}}^{-1}]\rightarrow \mathscr{B}[\mathbf{W}_{\mathscr{B}}^{-1}]$. Moreover, we give a simple description of $\mathcal{G}$ in the case when the…
In this paper we investigate the construction of bicategories of fractions originally described by D. Pronk: given any bicategory $\mathcal{C}$ together with a suitable class of morphisms $\mathbf{W}$, one can construct a bicategory $\mathcal{C}[\mathbf{W}^{-1}]$, where all the morphisms of $\mathbf{W}$ are turned into internal equivalences, and that is universal with respect to this property. Most of the descriptions leading to this construction were long and heavily based on the axiom of choice. In this paper we considerably simplify the description of the equivalence relation on $2$-morphis…
Relational structures are emerging as ubiquitous mathematical machinery in the semantics of open systems of various kinds. Cartesian bicategories are a well-known categorical algebra of relations that has proved especially useful in recent applications. The passage between a category and its bicategory of relations is an important question that has been widely studied for decades. We study an alternative construction that yields a cartesian bicategory of relations. Its behaviour is closely related to the axiom of choice, which itself can be expressed in the language of cartesian bicategories.
Poly-bicategories generalise planar polycategories in the same way as bicategories generalise monoidal categories. In a poly-bicategory, the existence of enough 2-cells satisfying certain universal properties (representability) induces coherent algebraic structure on the 2-graph of single-input, single-output 2-cells. A special case of this theory was used by Hermida to produce a proof of strictification for bicategories. No full strictification is possible for higher-dimensional categories, seemingly due to problems with 2-cells that have degenerate boundaries; it was conjectured by C. Simpso…
This paper explores the relationship amongst the various simplicial and pseudo-simplicial objects characteristically associated to any bicategory C. It proves the fact that the geometric realizations of all of these possible candidate `nerves of C' are homotopy equivalent. Any one of these realizations could therefore be taken as the classifying space BC of the bicategory. Its other major result proves a direct extension of Thomason's `Homotopy Colimit Theorem' to bicategories: When the homotopy colimit construction is carried out on a diagram of spaces obtained by applying the classifying spa…
The notion of a weak duality involution on a bicategory was recently introduced by Shulman in [arXiv:1606.05058]. We construct a weak duality involution on the fully dualisable part of $\text{Alg}$, the Morita bicategory of finite-dimensional k-algebras. The 2-category $\text{KV}$ of Kapranov-Voevodsky k-vector spaces may be equipped with a canonical strict duality involution. We show that the pseudofunctor $\text{Rep}: \text{Alg}^{fd} \to \text{KV}$ sending an algebra to its category of finite-dimensional modules may be canonically equipped with the structure of a duality pseudofunctor. Thus …
The paper defines polynomials in a bicategory $\mathscr{M}$. Polynomials in bicategories $\mathrm{Spn}\mathscr{C} \ $ of spans in a finitely complete category $\mathscr{C} \ $ agree with polynomials in $\mathscr{C} \ $ as defined by Nicola Gambino and Joachim Kock, and by Mark Weber. When $\mathscr{M}$ is \textit{calibrated}, we obtain another bicategory $\mathrm{Poly}\mathscr{M}$. We see that polynomials in $\mathscr{M}$ have representations as pseudofunctors $\mathscr{M}^{\mathrm{op}}\to \mathrm{Cat}$. Calibrations are produced for the bicategory of relations in a regular category and for th…
Interest in weak cubical n-categories arises in various contexts, in particular in topological field theories. In this paper, we describe a concept of double bicategory, namely a strict model of the theory of bicategories in Bicat. We show that in a special case one can reduce this to what we call a Verity double bicategory, after Domenic Verity. This is a weakened version of a double category, in the sense that composition in both horizontal and vertical directions satisfy associativity and unit laws only up to (coherent) isomorphisms. We prove that there are examples in the form of double bi…
We present a method of constructing monoidal, braided monoidal, and symmetric monoidal bicategories from corresponding types of monoidal double categories that satisfy a lifting condition. Many important monoidal bicategories arise naturally in this way, and applying our general method is much easier than explicitly verifying the coherence laws of a monoidal bicategory for each example. Abstracting from earlier work in this direction, we express the construction as a functor between locally cubical bicategories that preserves monoid objects; this ensures that it also preserves monoidal functor…
Given a bicategory C and a family W of arrows of C, we give conditions on the pair (C,W) that allow us to construct the bicategorical localization with respect to W by dealing only with the 2-cells, that is without adding objects or arrows to C. We show that in this case, the 2-cells of the localization can be given by the homotopies with respect to W, a notion defined in this article which is closely related to Quillen's notion of homotopy for model categories but depends only on a single family of arrows. This localization result has a natural application to the construction of the homotopy …
It is well known that rings are the objects of a bicategory, whose arrows are bimodules, composed through the bimodule tensor product. We give an analogous bicategorical description of C*-algebras, von Neumann algebras, Lie groupoids, symplectic groupoids, and Poisson manifolds. The upshot is that known definitions of Morita equivalence for any of these cases amount to isomorphism of objects in the pertinent bicategory.
The familiar construction of categories of fractions, due to Gabriel and Zisman, allows one to invert a class W of arrows in a category in a universal way. Similarly, bicategories of fractions allow one to invert a collection of arrows in a bicategory. In this case the arrows are inverted in the sense that they are made into equivalences. As with categories of fractions, bicategories of fractions suffer from the defect that they need not be locally small even when the bicategory in which W lives is locally small. Similarly, in the case where W is a class of arrows in a 2-category, the bicatego…
We show how to construct a Gamma-bicategory from a symmetric monoidal bicategory, and use that to show that the classifying space is an infinite loop space upon group completion. We also show a way to relate this construction to the classic Gamma-category construction for a bipermutative category. As an example, we use this machinery to construct a delooping of the K-theory of a bimonoidal category as defined by Baas-Dundas-Rognes.
Bicategories of spans are characterized as cartesian bicategories in which every comonad has an Eilenberg-Moore ob ject and every left adjoint arrow is comonadic.
Given any category $\mathcal{C}$ with pullbacks and a terminal object, we show that the data consisting of the objects of $\mathcal{C}$, the spans of $\mathcal{C}$, and the isomorphism classes of spans of spans of $\mathcal{C}$, forms a bicategory. We denote this bicategory Span$_2(\mathcal{C})$ and show that this construction can be applied to give a bicategory of $n$-manifolds, cobordisms of those manifolds, and cobordisms of cobordisms.
In this thesis, we introduce Cartesian double categories, motivated by the work of Carboni, Kelly, Walters, and Wood on Cartesian bicategories. Moving from bicategories to the slightly more generalized notion of double categories allows us to set the whole theory inside the welcoming 2-category of double categories, and to overcome technical problems that were caused by working with left adjoints inside a general bicategory. Cartesian double categories that are also fibrant are of particular interest to us. After describing some important properties of Cartesian and fibrant double categories, …
Actions of bicategories arise as categorification of actions of categories. They appear in a variety of different contexts in mathematics, from Moerdijk's classification of regular Lie groupoids in foliation theory, to Waldmann's work on deformation quantization. For any such action we introduce an action bicategory, together with a canonical projection (strict) 2-functor to the bicategory which acts. When the bicategory is a bigroupoid, we can impose the additional condition that action is principal in bicategorical sense, giving rise to a bigroupoid 2-torsor. In that case, the Duskin nerve o…
Notions of generalized multicategory have been defined in numerous contexts throughout the literature, and include such diverse examples as symmetric multicategories, globular operads, Lawvere theories, and topological spaces. In each case, generalized multicategories are defined as the "lax algebras" or "Kleisli monoids" relative to a "monad" on a bicategory. However, the meanings of these words differ from author to author, as do the specific bicategories considered. We propose a unified framework: by working with monads on double categories and related structures (rather than bicategories),…
If $\mathbf{C}$ is a category with pullbacks then there is a bicategory with the same objects as $\mathbf{C}$, spans as morphisms, and maps of spans as 2-morphisms, as shown by Benabou. Fong has developed a theory of "decorated" cospans, which are cospans in $\mathbf{C}$ equipped with extra structure. This extra structure arises from a lax symmetric monoidal functor $F \colon \mathbf{C} \to \mathbf{D}$; we use this functor to "decorate" each cospan with apex $N \in \mathbf{C}$ with an element of $F(N)$. Using a result of Shulman, we show that when $\mathbf{C}$ has finite colimits, decorated co…
Recently, there has been growing interest in bicategorical models of programming languages, which are "proof-relevant" in the sense that they keep distinct account of execution traces leading to the same observable outcomes, while assigning a formal meaning to reduction paths as isomorphisms. In this paper we introduce a new model, a bicategory called thin spans of groupoids. Conceptually it is close to Fiore et al.'s generalized species of structures and to Melliès' homotopy template games, but fundamentally differs as to how replication of resources and the resulting symmetries are treated. …
For a topos $\mathbf{T}$, there is a bicategory $\mathbf{MonicSp(Csp(T))}$ whose objects are those of $\mathbf{T}$, morphisms are cospans in $\mathbf{T}$, and 2-morphisms are isomorphism classes of monic spans of cospans in $\mathbf{T}$. Using a result of Shulman, we prove that $\mathbf{MonicSp(Csp(T))}$ is symmetric monoidal, and moreover, that it is compact closed in the sense of Stay. We provide an application which illustrates how to encode double pushout rewrite rules as $2$-morphisms inside a compact closed sub-bicategory of $\mathbf{MonicSp(Csp(Graph))}$.
Lenses are a mathematical structure for maintaining consistency between a pair of systems. In their ongoing research program, Johnson and Rosebrugh have sought to unify the treatment of symmetric lenses with spans of asymmetric lenses. This paper presents a diagrammatic approach to symmetric lenses between categories, through representing the propagation operations with Mealy morphisms. The central result of this paper is to demonstrate that the bicategory of symmetric lenses is locally adjoint to the bicategory of spans of asymmetric lenses, through constructing an explicit adjoint triple bet…
We associate, in a functorial way, a monoidal bicategory $\mathsf{Span}| \mathcal V$ to any monoidal bicategory $\mathcal V$. Two examples of this construction are of particular interest: Hopf polyads (due to Bruguières) can be seen as Hopf monads in $\mathsf{Span}| \mathsf{Cat}$ while Hopf group monoids in a braided monoidal category $V$ (in the spirit of Turaev and Zunino), and Hopf categories over $V$ (by Batista, Caenepeel and Vercruysse) both turn out to be Hopf monads in $\mathsf{Span}| V$. Hopf group monoids and Hopf categories are Hopf monads on a distinguished type of monoidales fitti…
Colimits that satisfy the Van Kampen condition have interesting exactness properties. We show that the elementary presentation of the Van Kampen condition is actually a characterisation of a universal property in the associated bicategory of spans. The main theorem states that Van Kampen cocones are precisely those diagrams in a category that induce bicolimit diagrams in its associated bicategory of spans, provided that the category has pullbacks and enough colimits.
We compare the bicategory of spans with that of bisets (a.k.a. bimodules, distributors, profunctors) in the context of finite groupoids. We construct in particular a well-behaved pseudo-functor from spans to bisets. This yields an application to the axiomatic representation theory of finite groups, namely a new proof and a strengthening of Ganter and Nakaoka's identification of Bouc's category of biset functors as a reflective subcategory of global Mackey functors. To this end, we also prove a tensor-monadicity result for linear functor categories.
