Related papers: Open Diagrams via Coend Calculus
One goal of applied category theory is to understand open systems. We compare two ways of describing open systems as cospans equipped with extra data. First, given a functor $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$, a "structured cospan" is a…
Let $\mathcal C$ be a category with finite colimits, writing its coproduct $+$, and let $(\mathcal D, \otimes)$ be a braided monoidal category. We describe a method of producing a symmetric monoidal category from a lax braided monoidal…
We identify morphisms of strong profunctors as a categorification of quantum supermaps. These black-box generalisations of diagrams-with-holes are hence placed within the broader field of profunctor optics, as morphisms in the category of…
Bimonoidal categories (also known as rig categories) are categories with two monoidal structures, one of which distributes over the other. We formally define sheet diagrams, a graphical calculus for bimonoidal categories that was informally…
We study a special sort of 2-dimensional extended Topological Quantum Field Theories (TQFTs) which we call open-closed TQFTs. These are defined on open-closed cobordisms by which we mean smooth compact oriented 2-manifolds with corners that…
Various simplicial complexes can be associated with a graph. Box complexes form an important families of such simplicial complexes and are especially useful for providing lower bounds on the chromatic number of the graph via some of their…
We study polynomial functors over locally cartesian closed categories. After setting up the basic theory, we show how polynomial functors assemble into a double category, in fact a framed bicategory. We show that the free monad on a…
We study monoidal profunctors as a tool to reason and structure pure functional programs both from a categorical perspective and as a Haskell implementation. From the categorical point of view we approach them as monoids in a certain…
Morphisms in the linear category A of Jacobi diagrams in handlebodies give rise to interesting contravariant functors on the category gr of finitely-generated free groups, encoding part of the composition structure of the category A. These…
This is an overview of double categories of "open systems": systems that can interact with their environment. We focus on the variable sharing paradigm, where we compose open systems by identifying variables. This paradigm is often…
This thesis provides an introduction to the various category theory ideas employed in topological quantum field theory. These theories are viewed as symmetric monoidal functors from topological cobordism categories into the category of…
Lenses are a well-established structure for modelling bidirectional transformations, such as the interactions between a database and a view of it. Lenses may be symmetric or asymmetric, and may be composed, forming the morphisms of a…
We show that the category of (reflexive) graphs and graph maps carries exactly two closed symmetric monoidal products: the box product and the categorical product.
Monoidal width was recently introduced by the authors as a measure of the complexity of decomposing morphisms in monoidal categories. We have shown that in a monoidal category of cospans of graphs, monoidal width and its variants can be…
We give an alternate conception of string diagrams as labeled 1-dimensional oriented cobordisms, the operad of which we denote by Cob/O, where O is the set of string labels. The axioms of traced (symmetric monoidal) categories are fully…
One goal of applied category theory is to better understand networks appearing throughout science and engineering. Here we introduce "structured cospans" as a way to study networks with inputs and outputs. Given a functor $L \colon…
Categories, n-categories, double categories, and multicategories (among others) all have similar definitions as collections of cells with composition operations. We give an explicit description of the information required to define any…
We define a diagrammatic monoidal category, together with a full and essentially surjective monoidal functor from this category to the category of modules over the exceptional Lie algebra of type $F_4$. In this way, we obtain a set of…
We show that braided, sylleptic and symmetric monoidal bicategories are precisely the $\mathsf{E}_k$-monoids in the cartesian monoidal $(\infty,1)$-category of bicategories for respective integers $k$. To manage the underlying computations,…
This article offers an intuitive introduction to monoidal categories through the lens of painting, presenting abstract mathematical concepts with visual and tactile analogies. Aimed at curious undergraduates and non-specialists, it seeks to…