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 -category of spans in a pullback-complete -category to more general shapes: for a large class of algebraic patterns , we define a -monoidal -category of -shaped spans in , and we identify -monads in it with Segal -objects in . For the cell pattern , this recovers a homotopical reformulation of Batanin's original definition of weak -categories, and in general can be seen as a variant of the generalised multicategories of Burroni, Hermida, Leinster and Cruttwell-Shulman.
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)