Quantale-valued topological spaces via closure and convergence (Q2405102)

Based on Lowen's approach spaces which provide a synthesis of Lawvere's small \([0, \infty]\)-enriched categories and the Manes-Barr representation of topological spaces in terms of ultrafilter convergence several authors have investigated ``probabilistic'' generalizations of these concepts. So in this paper a quantale-based study of generalized topological spaces is developed to handle ``distance'', ``closure'' and ``convergence'' in a unified manner. The presented treatment works with an arbitrary quantale \(\mathsf{V}=(\mathsf{V},\otimes,\mathsf{k})\) which, for the main results, is required to be completely distributive. Here \(\mathsf{V}\) denotes a complete lattice with a monoid structure whose binary operation \(\otimes\) preserves suprema in each variable, and the \(\mathsf{V}\)-powerset functor \(\mathsf{P}_{\mathsf V}\) : \(\mathrm{SET}\to\mathrm{SET}\) is given by \[ (f: X\to Y) \mapsto (f_!: \mathsf{V}^X\to \mathsf{V}^Y), f_!(\sigma)(y):= \bigvee_{x\in f^{-1}y}\sigma (x). \] By specifying \(\mathsf{V}\) in a suitable sense one obtains the equivalence of the description of topologies in terms of closure and ultrafilter convergence or the known equivalence of approach spaces in terms of point-set distances and of ultrafilter convergence and at last the corresponding equivalence for probabilistic approach spaces by specifying the left-continuity condition. The advantage of working in the context of a general quantale is that it makes the proofs more transparent as they occur in concrete cases. Furthermore the paper uses the methods of monoidal topology and prefers the lax-algebraic setting described by Tholen. In the last section the so-called change-of-base functors are considered for the categories at issue in this paper and a unified proof for the known facts that TOP may be fully embedded into APP as a simultaneously reflective and coreflective subcategory which, in turn, is reflectively and coreflectively embedded in PROBAPP results as an application of some central theorem.