English

Planar Heyting Algebras for Children 2: Local Operators, J-Operators, and Slashings

Category Theory 2020-01-24 v1

Abstract

Choose a topos EE. There are several different "notions of sheafness" on EE. How do we visualize them? Let's refer to the classifier object of EE as Ω\Omega, and to its Heyting Algebra of truth-values, Sub(1E)Sub(1_E), as HH; we will sometimes call HH the "logic" of the topos. There is a well-known way of representing notions of sheafness as morphisms j:ΩΩj:\Omega\to \Omega, but these `jj's yield big diagrams when we draw them explicitly; here we will see a way to represent these `jj's as maps J:HHJ:H\to H in a way that is much more manageable. In the previous paper of this series we showed how certain toy models of Heyting Algebras, called "ZHAs", can be used to develop visual intuition for how Heyting Algebras and Intuitionistic Propositional Logic work; here we will extend that to sheaves. The full idea is this: notions of sheafness correspond to local operators and vice-versa; local operators correspond to J-operators and vice-versa; if our Heyting Algebra HH is a ZHA then J-operators correspond to slashings on HH, and vice-versa; slashings on HH correspond to "sets of question marks" and vice-versa, and each set of question marks induces a notion of erasing and reconstructing, which induces a sheaf. Also, every ZHA HH corresponds to an (acyclic) 2-column graph, and vice-versa, and for any two-column graph (P,A)(P,A) the logic of the topos Set(P,A)\mathbf{Set}^{(P,A)} is exactly the ZHA HH associated to (P,A)(P,A).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.08338,
  title  = {Planar Heyting Algebras for Children 2: Local Operators, J-Operators, and Slashings},
  author = {Eduardo Ochs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.08338},
  year   = {2020}
}