The symmetric topos (Q1910730)

In a celebrated monograph [``An extension of the Galois theory of Grothendieck'', Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 309 (1984; Zbl 0541.18002)], \textit{A. Joyal} and \textit{M. Tierney} studied the category of locales (or frames) by regarding them as `ring' relative to a category of `modules' which were (complete) sup-semilattices. The advantage of this analogy was that it enabled them to bring descent techniques from ring theory to bear on the study of locales. In the present paper, the authors begin the development of a similar analogy for Grothendieck toposes: here the rôle of modules is taken by the 2-category \(A\) of (locally small) cocomplete categories satisfying a suitable smallness condition. The analogue of multiplication is taken to be finite limits; the resulting `rings' form a 2-category \(R\) which is dual to the usual 2-category of Grothendieck toposes and geometric morphisms. The main result of the present paper is the explicit construction of a left biadjoint to the forgetful functor \(R \to A\); this is the construction which the authors have christened the symmetric topos, by analogy with the symmetric algebra on a module. The fact that possession of finite limits is a `property' rather than an additional structure on an object of \(A\) has an interesting reflection in the following result: for any object \({\mathcal A}\) of \(A\), there is a topos \(T{\mathcal A}\) whose symmetric topos is equivalent to that of \({\mathcal A}\).