scientific article; zbMATH DE number 29047

2-categories adjointness biadjunction bicategories of relations in regular categories Cartesian bicategories enriched category lax functor Ord-categories

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Categories of spans/cospans, relations, or partial maps (18B10) Enriched categories (over closed or monoidal categories) (18D20)

Review text

Nearly two decades after \textit{J. W. Gray's} work [Formal category theory. Adjointness for 2-categories (Lect. Notes Math. 391) (1974; Zbl 0285.18006)], the most useful general notion of adjointness for morphisms between 2-categories has still not emerged. Perhaps the good notion should depend on the kind of 2-categories in mind; 2-categories whose arrows are functions or functors are of a different nature from those whose arrows are relations or profunctors. For the former kind of 2- category, usual Cat-enriched adjunction (or its mild ``pseudo variant) seems quite adequate. It is the latter kind with which the present paper deals, and seems (to the reviewer) to provide the definitive notion in the special case of Ord-categories (that is, 2-categories where the hom- categories are partially ordered sets). What is particularly appealing is that the notion is usual adjunction within a cleverly chosen 2-category \(F\). As a routine consequence, adjoints are unique up to isomorphism. The authors give a characterization of those arrows in \(F\) with right adjoints, and apply it to arrows \(A\to 1\) and \(A\to A\times A\) in \(F\). They find that the objects \(A\) of \(F\) with finite products are essentially the Cartesian bicategories of the first author and \textit{R. F. C. Walters} [J. Pure Appl. Algebra 49, 11-32 (1987; Zbl 0637.18003)]. Adjunctions in \(F\) between bicategories of relations in regular categories are examined.

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