English

Generalization of formal monad theory to lax functors

Category Theory 2024-09-20 v2

Abstract

We study lax functors between bicategories as a generalized concept of monads and describe generalized notions and theorems of formal monad theory for lax functors. Our first approach is to use the 2-monad whose lax algebras are lax functors. We define lax doctrinal adjunctions for a 2-monad TT on a 2-category K\mathcal{K}, and we show that if K\mathcal{K} admits and TT preserves certain codescent objects, the 2-category Lax-T-Algc\mathrm{Lax}\text{-}{T}\text{-}\mathrm{Alg}_{c} of lax algebras and colax morphisms can coreflectively be embedded in the 2-category of lax doctrinal adjunctions. This coreflective embedding generalizes the relation between monads and adjunctions. Our second approach is to see a distributive law for monads as a 2-functor from a lax Gray tensor product, and we show a generalized form of Beck's characterization of distributive laws.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.06420,
  title  = {Generalization of formal monad theory to lax functors},
  author = {Kengo Hirata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06420},
  year   = {2024}
}

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37pages