On Thu, 2 Sep 2010, Michael Shulman wrote:
On the other hand, am I right that you (John) have also written about string diagrams in closed (non-autonomous) monoidal categories? Those are a bit subtler, and I don't recall them in the work of Joyal and Street (am I wrong?).
speaking of coherence in closed categories, i was always under the impression that kelly and maclane, while writing their 1971 JPAA paper, and the later one (1979?) secretly drew string diagrams on the side, and then translated them into categorical diagrams. at least for counterexamples, this works. and in the kelly-laplaza paper about compact/autonomous categories: the free construction is expressed in terms of strings, but i guess at the time it was easier to describe them in words, than to wait for the publisher to typeset your stings for you. maybe i am projecting back. or maybe category theory has grown so old that some things are easier to reconstruct than to remember :) -- dusko [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]