English

The free tangent structure

Category Theory 2016-10-26 v2

Abstract

At the heart of differential geometry is the construction of the tangent bundle of a manifold. There are various abstractions of this construction, and this paper seeks to compare two of them: Synthetic Differential Geometry (SDG) and Tangent Structures. Tangent structure is defined via giving an underlying category M and a tangent functor T along with a list of natural transformations satisfying a set of axioms, then detailing the behaviour of T in the category End(M). SDG on the other hand is defined through the use of Weil algebras. The aim of this paper is to present a more precise relationship between the two approaches for describing tangent structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.07275,
  title  = {The free tangent structure},
  author = {Poon Leung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.07275},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

updated version, the definition of the category Weil_1 has changed

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:07:50.921Z