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... wlawvere@buffalo.edu wrote:
In my review of Anders Kock's Synthetic Differential Geometry, Second Edition, there is a wrong statement that I want to correct. (This was in the SIAM REVIEW, vol. 49, No.2 pp 349-350). The statement was that Chen's category does not include the representability of smooth function spaces. But from his paper In Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics,vol 1174, pp 38-42 it is clear that it does. I thank Anders for pointing out this slip.
This is a good opportunity to emphasize that the works of KT Chen and of Alfred Frolicher (that were referred to in the beginning of the above review) contain several contributions of value both to applications and to more topos-theoretic formulations. For example, Frolicher's use of Lemmas by Boman and others reveals how little of the specific parameter "smooth" needs to be given to the very general machinery of adjoint functors and abstact sets in order to obtain smooth infinite dimensional spaces of all kinds. (Namely a suitable topos of actions by only unary operations on the line is fully embedded in the desired topos in such a way that the algebraic theory of n-ary operations that naturally exist in the small one determines the whole algebraic category whose sheaves include the large one.) And Chen's smooth space of piecewise-smooth curves can surely be further applied, as can his special use of convex models for plots.
Bill Lawvere