Hello, On 11/01/2007, at 4:34 AM, Matt Brin wrote:
I am writing up material that has been taking shape over a number of years. The question is of the type "how much of this has been done before?"
The shape of the math is that questions of coherence of categories with multiplication can be given a group theory flavor and so groups are injected in the middle of the discussion.
Patrick Dehornoy has some results on relating Thompson's groups to coherence in monoidal categories and the like. The papers that spring to mind are: The structure group for the associativity identity; J. P. Appl. Algebra 111 (1996) 59-82; Geometric presentations for Thompson's groups; Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, 203 (2005) 1-44 Both of these can be found on his webpage at http:// www.math.unicaen.fr/~dehornoy/papers.html Best regards, Jon -- http://rsise.anu.edu.au/~jon