The elementary theory of the 2-category of small categories
Abstract
We give an elementary description of -categories of internal categories, functors and natural transformations, where is a category modelling Lawvere's elementary theory of the category of sets (ETCS). This extends Bourke's characterisation of -categories where has pullbacks to take account for the extra properties in ETCS, and Lawvere's characterisation of the (one dimensional) category of small categories to take account of the two-dimensional structure. Important two-dimensional concepts which we introduce include -well-pointedness, full-subobject classifiers, and the categorified axiom of choice. Along the way, we show how generating families (resp. orthogonal factorisation systems) on give rise to generating families (resp. orthogonal factorisation systems) on , results which we believe are of independent interest.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.03647,
title = {The elementary theory of the 2-category of small categories},
author = {Calum Hughes and Adrian Miranda},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03647},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
v2. 37 pages. Updated definition of 2D natural numbers object in order to give it a genuine 2D universal property. Other minor changes following referee report including some reorganisation of material for better flow. To appear in the Theory and Applications of Categories special volume for Bill Lawvere