A Whirlwind Tour of the World of $(\Infty, 1) $-Categories
Contemporary Mathematics A Whirlwind Tour of the World of (∞, 1)-categories Omar Antol´ın Camarena Abstract. This introduction to higher category theory is intended to a give the reader an intuition for what (∞, 1)-categories are, when they are an appro- priate tool, how they fit into the landscape of higher category, how concepts from ordinary category theory generalize to this new setting, and what uses people have put the theory to. It is a rough guide to a vast terrain, focuses on ideas and motivation, omits almost all proofs and technical details, and provides many references. 1. Introduction An (∞, 1)-category is a category-like thing that besides objects and morphisms has 2-morphisms between morphisms, 3-morphisms between 2-morphisms, and so on all the way to ∞; but in which all k-morphisms for k> 1 are “invertible”, at least up to higher invertible morphisms. This is the sort of invertibility that homotopies have: the composition or concatenation of any homotopy with its reverse is not actually the identity but it is homotopic to it. So we can picture an (∞, 1)-category as a “homotopy theory”: a kind of category with objects, morphisms, homotopies between morphisms, higher homotopies between homotopies and so on. Any context where there is a notion of homotopy, can benefit from the use of (∞, 1)-categories in place of ordinary categories. This includes homotopy theory itself, of course, but also homological algebra and more generally wherever Quillen’s version of abstract homotopy theory, the theory of model categories, has been used. Notions of homotopy are perhaps more common than one might expect since the arXiv:1303.4669v3 [math.CT] 5 Sep 2013 philosophy of model categories shows that simply specifying a class of “weak equiv- alences” in a category, a collection of morphisms which we wish to treat as if they were isomorphisms, produces a notion of homotopy.
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