Monthly Archives: June 2006

In my previous entry, I deferred the problem of defining lax monoidal functors between radical monoidal categories. But yesterday evening on the train I realised that there is a cute way to think about lax monoidal functors, which makes it … Continue reading →

As you can probably tell, I’m hugely excited about Joachim Kock’s paper. I apologize to those of you who read it a year ago, and think I’m a bit late to the party. Most late-stage PhD students, I imagine, have … Continue reading →

This morning’s crop of arxiv updates included a new version of Joachim Kock’s Elementary remarks on units in monoidal categories. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the earlier version; it’s a beautiful result, and it implies the lemma of mine that I … Continue reading →

It’s a curious (though well known) phenomenon that an equivalence in a bicategory can always be converted into an adjoint equivalence by tweaking one of the 2-cells. There are two ways to prove it, that I know of. The elementary … Continue reading →

One of the great joys of category theory is the way you can so often watch familiar structures emerge unexpectedly from general constructions. It’s particularly amusing to apply the formal theory of monads to the 2-category Rel of sets and … Continue reading →

On Monday afternoon I had a look at Andrea Schalk and Valeria de Paiva’s paper on Poset-valued sets, which I was reminded of recently by Greg Restall’s survey of relevant and substructural logics. It gives a recipe for constructing models … Continue reading →

I was chatting to Craig “Cap. Astro” Pastro yesterday evening over a beer, and he mentioned an interesting question: if you take the monoidal centre of a braided monoidal category, do you get back the thing you started with? We … Continue reading →