English

Extending set functors to generalised metric spaces

Category Theory 2023-06-22 v3 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

For a commutative quantale V\mathcal{V}, the category Vcat\mathcal{V}-cat can be perceived as a category of generalised metric spaces and non-expanding maps. We show that any type constructor TT (formalised as an endofunctor on sets) can be extended in a canonical way to a type constructor TVT_{\mathcal{V}} on Vcat\mathcal{V}-cat. The proof yields methods of explicitly calculating the extension in concrete examples, which cover well-known notions such as the Pompeiu-Hausdorff metric as well as new ones. Conceptually, this allows us to to solve the same recursive domain equation XTXX\cong TX in different categories (such as sets and metric spaces) and we study how their solutions (that is, the final coalgebras) are related via change of base. Mathematically, the heart of the matter is to show that, for any commutative quantale V\mathcal{V}, the `discrete' functor D:SetVcatD:\mathsf{Set}\to \mathcal{V}-cat from sets to categories enriched over V\mathcal{V} is Vcat\mathcal{V}-cat-dense and has a density presentation that allows us to compute left-Kan extensions along DD.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.02229,
  title  = {Extending set functors to generalised metric spaces},
  author = {Adriana Balan and Alexander Kurz and Jiří Velebil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.02229},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

57 pages; extended version of the paper presented at CALCO 2015; accepted for publication in LMCS; Sections 2.4 and 3.3 were added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:57:22.145Z