A coherent approach to pseudomonads (Q1578071)

A monad (= triple) on an object \(A\) consists of an endomorphism \(t\) on \(A\) together with multiplication and unit 2-cells which satisfy associativity and unital equalities. This notion makes sense in any 2-category (or even any bicategory). A pseudomonad has the same data plus coherent invertible 3-cells replacing the equalities. This notion makes sense in any tricategory; however, in view of a coherence result of \textit{R. Gordon}, \textit{A. J. Power} and \textit{R. Street} [``Coherence for tricategories'', Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 558 (1995; Zbl 0836.18001)], the author works in a Gray-category rather than a general tricategory. It is classical that a monad gives rise to a co-augmented cosimplicial object of \(\text{End}(A)\); in fact, a strict monoidal functor from the monoidal category \({\mathcal O}rd\) of finite ordinals to \(\text{End}(A)\). The author constructs a Gray-monoid \({\mathcal O}rd\)' such that a pseudomonad amounts to a Gray-monoid morphism from \({\mathcal O}rd\)' to \(\text{End} (A)\). Rewriting techniques are used to prove this. The paper then discusses algebras for pseudomonads and other aspects of the ``formal theory of pseudomonads''. This paves the way for an alternative approach to \textit{F. Marmolejo} [``Distributive laws for pseudomonads'', Theory Appl. Categ. 5, 91-147 (1999; Zbl 0919.18004)].