English

All Segal objects are generalised monads in spans

Category Theory 2025-12-01 v2 Algebraic Topology

Abstract

We extend Barwick's and Haugseng's construction of the double \infty-category of spans in a pullback-complete \infty-category C\mathfrak{C} to more general shapes: for a large class of algebraic patterns P\mathfrak{P}, we define a P\mathfrak{P}-monoidal \infty-category of P\mathfrak{P}-shaped spans in C\mathfrak{C}, and we identify P\mathfrak{P}-monads in it with Segal P\mathfrak{P}-objects in C\mathfrak{C}. For the cell pattern Θop\Theta^{\mathrm{op}}, this recovers a homotopical reformulation of Batanin's original definition of weak ω\omega-categories, and in general can be seen as a variant of the generalised multicategories of Burroni, Hermida, Leinster and Cruttwell-Shulman.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.04704,
  title  = {All Segal objects are generalised monads in spans},
  author = {David Kern},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.04704},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

V2: Published version. Important corrections (chiefly: missing assumption of soundness in Lemma 4.7)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:12:35.084Z