English

Rewriting for Symmetric Monoidal Categories with Commutative (Co)Monoid Structure

Logic in Computer Science 2025-02-05 v4 Category Theory

Abstract

String diagrams are pictorial representations for morphisms of symmetric monoidal categories. They constitute an intuitive and expressive graphical syntax, which has found application in a very diverse range of fields including concurrency theory, quantum computing, control theory, machine learning, linguistics, and digital circuits. Rewriting theory for string diagrams relies on a combinatorial interpretation as double-pushout rewriting of certain hypergraphs. As previously studied, there is a `tension' in this interpretation: in order to make it sound and complete, we either need to add structure on string diagrams (in particular, Frobenius algebra structure) or pose restrictions on double-pushout rewriting (resulting in 'convex' rewriting). From the string diagram viewpoint, imposing a full Frobenius structure may not always be natural or desirable in applications, which motivates our study of a weaker requirement: commutative monoid structure. In this work we characterise string diagram rewriting modulo commutative monoid equations, via a sound and complete interpretation in a suitable notion of double-pushout rewriting of hypergraphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.04274,
  title  = {Rewriting for Symmetric Monoidal Categories with Commutative (Co)Monoid Structure},
  author = {Aleksandar Milosavljevic and Robin Piedeleu and Fabio Zanasi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.04274},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:42:51.050Z