On semiflexible, flexible and pie algebras (Q1946170)

It is well known that classical universal algebra is extended by the category-theoretic notion of a monad on sets, and it is quite justified to consider algebras for a monad, on any category other than that of sets, to be generalized algebras. It is also possible to consider 2-monads on 2-categories, thus to do universal algebra in this 2-categorical setting. In this way we may obtain for instance algebraic theories on the category of all (small) categories such as categories with finite (chosen) products. In this paper the authors describe the notion of pie algebras for a 2-monad, and they provide a series of characterizations of these objects together with semiflexible and flexible algebras which for pie algebras are shown to be related to the informal notion of freeness at the object level. They also describe the closure properties of such algebras under weighted colimits.