Topological categories, quantaloids and Isbell adjunctions

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Publication:2634700



Abstract: In fairly elementary terms this paper presents, and expands upon, a recent result by Garner by which the notion of topologicity of a concrete functor is subsumed under the concept of total cocompleteness of enriched category theory. Motivated by some key results of the 1970s, the paper develops all needed ingredients from the theory of quantaloids in order to place essential results of categorical topology into the context of quantaloid-enriched category theory, a field that previously drew its motivation and applications from other domains, such as quantum logic and sheaf theory.


Recently, \textit{R. Garner} [Theory Appl. Categ. 29, 406--421 (2014; Zbl 1305.18005)] stated that a faithful functor is topological in the sense of categorical topology [\textit{J. Adámek} et al., Repr. Theory Appl. Categ. 2006, No. 17, 1--507 (2006; Zbl 1113.18001)] if, and only if, it is total (same as totally cocomplete) in the sense of enriched category theory [\textit{R. Street} and \textit{R. Walters}, J. Algebra 50, 350--379 (1978; Zbl 0401.18004)], arriving thus at a common ground for two seemingly unrelated lines of category theory. Motivated by this achievement, the authors of the present paper make another step in the same direction, putting some results of categorical topology into the context of categories enriched in a quantaloid. In particular, they show how concrete categories over a category \textbf{B} can be naturally described as categories enriched in the free quantaloid over \textbf{B}. Interpreting structured sinks as presheaves gives then the result of R. Garner (Theorem 3.2 on page 217). Moreover, the authors provide an enriched category theory analogue of the result of \textit{O. Wyler} [General Topology Appl. 1, 17--28 (1971; Zbl 0215.51502)] stating that a concrete category is topological if, and only if, it is a fibration and an opfibration, and has complete lattices as fibres (Corollary 6.3 on page 225). They then present an enriched analogue of the result of \textit{R.-E. Hoffmann} [``Die kategorielle Auffassung der Initial- und Finaltopologie, Ph.D. thesis, University of Bochum, (1972)] on self-duality for topological functors, and also show that a category is total precisely when it appears as the category of the fixed objects under the so-called Isbell adjunction induced by a distributor \textit{L. Shen} and \textit{D. Zhang} [Theory Appl. Categ. 28, 577--615 (2013; Zbl 1273.18022)] (cf. Theorem 8.5 on page 231, and Corollary 9.3 on page 233). The paper is well written, carefully provides most of its required preliminaries, and will be of interest to the researchers, dealing with categorical topology.



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