Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. (2009), 146, 551 c 2009 Cambridge Philosophical Society 551 doi:10.1017/S0305004108002132 Printed in the United Kingdom First published online 28 January 2009 The low-dimensional structures formed by tricategories BY RICHARD GARNER Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University, Box 480,S-751 06 Uppsala, Sweden. e-mail:
[email protected] AND NICK GURSKI Department of Mathematics, Yale University, 10 Hillhouse Avenue, PO Box 208283, New Haven, CT 06520-8283, U.S.A. e-mail:
[email protected] (Received 15 November 2007; revised 2 September 2008) Abstract We form tricategories and the homomorphisms between them into a bicategory, whose 2-cells are certain degenerate tritransformations. We then enrich this bicategory into an ex- ample of a three-dimensional structure called a locally cubical bicategory, this being a bic- ategory enriched in the monoidal 2-category of pseudo double categories. Finally, we show that every sufficiently well-behaved locally cubical bicategory gives rise to a tricategory, and thereby deduce the existence of a tricategory of tricategories. 1. Introduction A major impetus behind many developments in 2-dimensional category theory has been the observation that, just as the fundamental concepts of set theory are categorical in nature, so the fundamental concepts of category theory are 2-categorical in nature. In other words, if one wishes to study categories “in the small” – as mathematical entities in their own right rather than as universes of discourse – then a profitable way of doing this is by studying the 2-categorical properties of Cat, the 2-category of all categories.1 Once one moves from the study of categories to the study of (possibly weak) n-categories, it is very natural to generalise the above maxim, and to assert that the fundamental concepts of n-category theory are (n + 1)-categorical in nature.