On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Bill Lawvere wrote:
fickle pedias and beckening bistros which, like the mythical black holes, often regurgitate information as buzzwords and disinformation.
Disinformation is *deliberate* false information, false information *intended* to mislead. As I understand it, Bill's statement says, among other things, that disinformation often appears on the n-Category Cafe. I don't know whether Bill really meant to say this. I very much hope not. I can't think of a single instance where someone at the n-Category Cafe has intended to mislead. Best wishes, Tom On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Bill Lawvere wrote:
Dear Jim and colleagues,
By urging the study of the good geometrical ideas and constructions of Chen and Froelicher, as well as of Bott, Brown, Hurewicz, Mostow, Spanier, Steenrod, I am of course not advocating the preferential resurrection of the particular categories they tentatively devised to contain the constructions.
Rather, recall as an analogy the proliferation of homology theories 60 years ago; it called for the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms to unite them. Similarly, the proliferation of such smooth categories 45 years ago would have needed a unification. Programs like SDG and Axiomatic Cohesion have been aiming toward such a unification.
The Eilenberg-Steenrod program required, above all, the functorality with respect to general maps; in that way it provided tools to construct even those cohomologies (such as compact support and L2 theories) that are less functorial.
The pioneers like Chen recognized that the constructions of interest (such as a smooth space of piecewise smooth paths or a smooth classifying space for a Lie group) should take place in a category with reasonable function spaces. They also realized, like Hurewicz in his 1949 Princeton lectures, that the primary geometric structure of the spaces in such categories must be given by figures and incidence relations (with the algebra of functions being determined by naturality from that, rather than conversely as had been the 'default' paradigm in 'general' topology, where the algebra of Sierpinski-valued functions had misleadingly seemed more basic than Frechet-shaped figures.) I have discussed this aspect in my Palermo paper on Volterra (2000).
The second aspect of the default paradigm, which those same pioneers seemingly failed to take fully into account, is repudiated in the first lines of Eilenberg & Zilber's 1950 paper that introduced the key category of Simplicial Sets. Some important simplicial sets having only one point are needed (for example, to construct the classifying space of a group). Therefore. the concreteness idea (in the sense of Kurosh) is misguided here, at least if taken to mean that the very special figure shape 1 is faithful on its own. That idea came of course from the need to establish the appropriate relation to a base category U such as Cantorian abstract sets, but that is achieved by enriching E in U via E(X,Y) = p(Y^X), without the need for faithfulness of p:E->U; this continues to make sense if E consists not of mere cohesive spaces but of spaces with dynamical actions or Dubuc germs, etcetera, even though then p itself extracts only equilibrium points. The case of simplicial sets illustrates that whether 1 is faithful just among given figure shapes alone has little bearing on whether that is true for a category of spaces that consist of figures of those shapes.
Naturally with special sites and special spaces one can get special results: for example, the purpose of map spaces is to permit representing a functional as a map, and in some cases the structure of such a map reduces to a mere property of the underlying point map. Such a result, in my Diagonal Arguments paper (TAC Reprints) was exemplified by both smooth and recursive contexts; in the latter context Phil Mulry (in his 1980 Buffalo thesis) developed the Banach-Mazur-Ersov conception of recursive functionals in a way that permits shaded degrees of nonrecursivity in domains of partial maps, yet as well permits collapse to a 'concrete' quasitopos for comparison with classical constructions.
Grothendieck did fully assimilate the need to repudiate the second aspect (as indeed already Galois had done implicitly; note that in the category of schemes over a field the terminal object does not represent a faithful functor to the abstract U). Therefore Grothendieck advocated that to any geometric situations there are, above all, toposes associated, so that in particular the meaningful comparisons between geometric situations start with comparing their toposes.
A Grothendieck topos is a quasitopos that satisfies the additional simplifying axiom: All monomorphisms are equalizers. A host of useful exactness properties follows, such as: (*)All epimonos are invertible. The categories relevant to analysis and geometry can be nicely and fully embedded in categories satisfying the property (*). That claim arouses instant suspicion among those who are still in the spell of the default paradigm; for that reason it may take a while for the above-mentioned 45-year-old proliferation of geometrical category-ideas to become recognized as fragments of one single theory.
There is still a great deal to be done in continuing K.T. Chen's application of such mathematical categories to the calculus of variations and in developing applications to other aspects of engineering physics. These achievements will require that students persist in the scientific method of alert participation, like guerilla fighters pursuing the laborious and cunning traversal of a treacherous jungle swamp. For in the maze of informative 21st century conferences and internet sites there lurk fickle pedias and beckening bistros which, like the mythical black holes, often regurgitate information as buzzwords and disinformation.
Bill
On Sun, 17 Aug 2008, jim stasheff wrote:
Bill,
Happy to see you contributing to the renaissance in interest in Chen's work.
It would be good to post your msg to the n-category cafe blog whee there's been an intense discussion of `smooth spaces' i various incarnaitons.
jim
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/05/convenient_categories_of_smoot.h...
----- The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401