Labelled cospan categories and properads (Q6051108)

Properads are generalizations of operads that allow operations with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, with composition along connected graphs. A \textit{labelled cospan category} in the sense of Steinebrunner is a symmetric monoidal functor \(\pi \colon C \to \mathbf{Csp}\) satisfying some axioms. Here \(\mathbf{Csp}\) is the category with finite sets as objects, and a morphism from \(A\) to \(B\) is an equivalence class of cospans \(A \to C \leftarrow B\). The authors prove the following conjecture of Steinebrunner. {Theorem A}. The 2-category of properads is biequivalent to the 2-category of labelled cospan categories. The proof of Theorem A uses the following variant. {Theorem B}. There is a strict 2-equivalence between the 2-category of properads and the 2-category of strict labelled cospan categories.