Polynomial functors and opetopes (Q984889)

Opetopes are combinatorial structures that were first introduced by \textit{J. C. Baez} and \textit{J. Dolan} [Adv. Math. 135, No. 2, 145--206 (1998; Zbl 0909.18006)] as a way of parametrizing higher dimensional operations present in weak \(n\)-categories. The theory of opetopes has been subsequently developed by several authors, but the persisting difficulty of this subject has been the fact that various proposed definitions of opetopes were very involved and abstract. The goal of this paper is to amend this situation by giving an elementary, combinatorial description of opetopes that is based on the language of trees and nested families of spheres. While this description is relatively short, the bulk of the paper is devoted to showing that it coincides with the Baez-Dolan definition, or more precisely with the variant of that definition introduced by \textit{T. Leinster} [Higher operads, higher categories. Lond. Math. Soc. Lect. Note Series 298 (2004; Zbl 1160.18001)]. The paper concludes with several concrete examples showing how the new definition can be used to compute sources, targets, and compositions of opetopes. In the appendix the authors describe also a machine implementation of the ``calculus of opetoes'' based on their definition.