English

Homodular pseudofunctors and bicategories of modules

Category Theory 2026-03-06 v2

Abstract

The universal property for the B\'enabou bicategory of distributors (although we call them "modules") presented here is somewhat implicitly spread over a series of papers and yet, to my knowledge, does not appear in print. The inclusion of a bicategory W\mathscr{W} into the bicategory W-Mod\mathscr{W}\text{-}\mathrm{Mod} of W\mathscr{W}-enriched categories and modules between them does have a completion property with respect to freely adjoining lax colimits (collages). Here we are interested in the universal property of the construction of W-Mod\mathscr{W}\text{-}\mathrm{Mod} from W-Cat\mathscr{W}\text{-}\mathrm{Cat}. What we have in mind is an objective version of the notion of {\em homological functor} used by Andr\'e Joyal in 1985.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03149,
  title  = {Homodular pseudofunctors and bicategories of modules},
  author = {Ross Street},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03149},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages; Nathanael Arkor provided very helpful feedback, much like a referee's report, on the first arXiv version of this paper by directing me to many references and by suggesting further examples. The generalised version of the main theorem that appears here was developed because of Nathanael's prodding me to include more of those examples

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:33:33.919Z