Monoidal structure on graphs
Greetings, fellow categorists. I'm wondering, if anybody has ever described the following monoidal structure on the category of oriented multigraphs, what MacLane calls graphs, the most common kind of graph in category theory (but not everywhere) : Given mgs X, Y, the set |X-oY| of vertices on X-oY is the set of mg morphisms X --> Y. Given f,g : X --> Y the set of arrows f-->g is the set of pairs (p_0,p_1) of functions such that forall x in |X|, p_0(x) : f-->g forall k: x-->y in X, p_1(k) : f(x)-->g(y) This co-contra bifunctor has a tensor left adjoint, which is symmetric and monoidal. I would be quite surprised if this structure had never been seen before. Enriched universal algebra in there has applications in computer science. Thanks, Francois Lamarche
A structure closely related to the one which Francois Lamarche asked about appeared in my thesis (1992) [see below] as a simple example of a sesqui-category which is not a 2-category. I too would expect it's appeared elsewhere, but I don't know where. John Stell \subsubsection{An Example of a Sesqui-Category} We include an example to show that there are naturally occurring sesqui-categories other than in connection with modelling term rewriting. The underlying category is {\bf Graph}. Suppose there are graphs $G$ and $H$, and graph morphisms $g,h : G \rightarrow H$. In this situation, the 2-cells $\alpha : g \rightarrow h$ are assignments to each node $n$ of $G$ of a path of edges from $ng$ to $nh$ in $H$. The compositions $\circ_R$ and $\circ_L$ are readily defined. If $f : F \rightarrow G$ then $f \circ_R \alpha$ assigns to a node $m$ of $F$ the path $(mf)\alpha$ in $H$. For the left composition, suppose we have $k : H \rightarrow K$. Since $n\alpha$ is a path in $H$, we obtain a path $(n\alpha)k$ by applying $k$ to each of the edges in the path $n \alpha$. Thus we define $\alpha \circ_L k$ to be the assignment to $n$ of the path $(n \alpha)k$. The vertical composition is the usual concatenation of paths. The identity 2-cells are assignments of zero length paths.
participants (2)
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Francois Lamarche -
John G. Stell