What is the locus classicus for "anafunctors"? As far as I know, an anafunctor F: C -> D is a presheaf on C x D^{op} such that F(c,.) is representable for any object c of C. Is this how it's normally defined? Where is composition of anafunctors discussed? Are there other names for these things? John Baez
John Baez asked, on January 24, about anafunctors. As far as I know, the notion was first explicitly introduced in my paper "Avoiding the axiom of choice in general category theory", in JPAA 108 (1996), 109-173. The term was suggested by Dusko Pavlovic. Precursors occur in the work of Max Kelly, and Andre Joyal, as I explain in the paper. The concept John gives is equivalent to "saturated anafunctor" in the paper; plain anafunctor is something that generalizes "functor". The wording of the definition of "saturated anafunctor" is different from John's definition, but the equivalence is fairly straightforward. I should mention that John`s definition is a very useful formulation, especially when one wants to generalize things to higher dimensional categories, as I came to realize some time after I started studying the John Baez/James Dolan announcement on weak n-categories. In addition to the paper mentioned above, there is reference to anafunctors in "First Order Logic with Dependent Sorts", a monograph that will appear in Springer's Lecture Notes in Logic as soon as I manage to complete the necessary revisions; it is available electronically from the TRIPLES and HYPATIA (?) sites.
participants (2)
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john baez -
Michael Makkai