Voevodsky on the homotopy lambda calculus
As has already been pointed out here, Vladimir Voevodsky is giving lectures at Stanford on the "homotopy lambda calculus": http://math.stanford.edu/distinguished_voevodsky.htm Can anyone report on what he said? Phil Scott has been teaching me about the lambda calculus and related stuff. He noted that in getting a cartesian closed category from intuitionistic logic, one takes sequents Gamma |- Delta as objects and *equivalence classes* of proofs as morphisms. One needs to take equivalence classes to get composition of morphisms to be associative, etc. From an n-categorical viewpoint it's natural to avoid working with equivalence classes and instead use 2-morphisms between morphisms, like associators, and so on, thus getting a "weak cartesian closed omega-category" - a concept which, alas, has probably not been defined yet. For someone like Voevodsky it would be natural to use ideas from homotopy theory instead and define something like a "cartesian closed category up to coherent homotopy". Such a thing should be lurking in the ordinary typed lambda calculus. Is this what Voevodsky is talking about? Or...? Best, jb
On Wednesday 22 February 2006 22:53, John Baez wrote:
From an n-categorical viewpoint it's natural to avoid working with equivalence classes and instead use 2-morphisms between morphisms, like associators, and so on, thus getting a "weak cartesian closed omega-category" - a concept which, alas, has probably not been defined yet.
I don't know about the omega-wheel, but at least the 2-wheel needs not be reinvented. For "cartesian closed 2-categories", a relevant reference is R.A.G. Seely, "Modelling computations: A 2-categorical framework". In Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 61--71, IEEE Computer Science Press, June 1987. I believe the above paper is "the first" on this topic (am I wrong?), and there must be more recent work. I know Neil Ghani did some, but Google also knows about "2-Lambda Calculus" by David Rydeheard, see http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~david/publications/TwoLambdaCalculus.ps . Andrej
Phil Scott has been teaching me about the lambda calculus and related stuff. He noted that in getting a cartesian closed category from intuitionistic logic,
At the risk of boring people by repeating a point I've made on this list before: a model of intuitionistic logic is a *bi*cartesian closed category. I see no reason to regard disjunction as more "peripheral" to intuitionistic logic than implication. (And, likewise, no reason to regard sum types as more peripheral to simple type theory than function types.) Does anybody disagree? Ccc's without coproducts (e.g. domains and continuous maps) arise in the study of call-by-name languages with effects (e.g. divergence). But they are not models of intuitionistic logic. I appreciate that all John said was that a model constructed from syntax is a ccc, which is true because it's a bi-ccc, so he didn't actually contradict this point. Paul
participants (3)
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Andrej Bauer -
John Baez -
Paul B Levy