It sticks in my mind that somewhere (probably Kelly's book on enriched category theory) I have seen the composition of enriched functors expressed in terms of coends. Our library's copy of Kelly is out, so I was hoping someone could help me recover the result and all necessary hypotheses. More precisely, I recall that it ran like this (and have proved this for ordinary categories): Associate to an enriched functor F:A \rightarrow B the functor Hom(F(-),-):A^{op} \times B \rightarrow V The composition of F and G is then given by \integral^c Hom(F(-),c) \otimes Hom(G(c),-) \cong Hom(G(F(-)),-). I am particularly interested in an analogous result for C-linear categories, and categories enriched in the category of C-linear categories, as this could have applications to topological and conformal field theories. Best Thoughts to all, David Yetter
David Yetter, in his query, seems to be making heavy weather of the composition of enriched functors. The composite of F:A --> B and G:B --> C is given on objects by GFa, while its "effect on maps" is the composite of the effects of F and of G as in A(a,a') ------> B(Fa,Fa') -----> C(GFa,GFa'). That is all. There is further a composition of profunctors (also called bimodules, or just modules), given by an evident co-end formula. Now every functor F determines a profunctor F*, where F*(a,b) is B(Fa,b); and the calculation David refers to (which is a simple application of the Yoneda isomorphism) is just the verification that (GF)* is canonically isomorphic to (G*)(F*). Of course this holds, in particular, for C-linear categories. New-Year greetings to all - Max Kelly.
Referring to recent contibutions by Yetter and Kelly. As remarked by Kelly, the construction is straightforward. A paper strongly recommended to be read in this context is Lawvere's 'Generalized Metric Spaces ...". The material about composition of profunctors + construction of "free algebras" are to be found in my contribution "Basic category theory", chpt. 6, in the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science (Abramsky, Gabbay, Maibaum, eds.). Axel Poigne
participants (3)
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Axel Poigne -
David Yetter -
Max Kelly