Comparing operadic theories of \(n\)-category (Q650989)

The paper is dedicated to comparing the theories of \(n\)-categories, that are weakly enriched operadically and \(n\)-categories, given as algebras for a contractible globular operad. Till now many different notions of weak \(n\)-categories appeared in the literature. Therefore the problem of comparing these theories is natural and some comparison functors were constructed already. In the presented paper the author compares the theories of Trimble and Batanin, which are examples of two theories, respectively, mentioned in the begining. Trimble's theory uses clasical operads, therefore the comparison makes possible to apply the well-known theory of clasical operads to the study of \(n\)-catgories. The author generalises Trimble's original definition to ``iterative operadic theory of \(n\)-categories'', introduced in the paper. The main result shows that any iterative operadic theory of \(n\)-categories is operadic in the sense of Batanin/Leinster. The obtained results are applied to Trimble's original definition, in order to relate it to the operad used by Batanin. The author makes remarks on related works in this field, in particular, on alternative approaches to this subject developed by Batanin, Cisinski and Weber.