Higher Categorical Structures and Their Applications
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: HIGHER CATEGORICAL STRUCTURES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS PROPOSED RESEARCH 1. Background, context, and perspective Eilenberg and Mac Lane introduced categories, functors, and natural transforma- tions in their 1945 paper [54]. The language they introduced transformed modern mathematics. Their focus was not on categories and functors, but on natural trans- formations, which are maps between functors. Implicitly, they were introducing the 2-category “Cat” of categories, functors, and natural transformations. Higher category theory concerns higher level notions of naturality, which can be expressed as maps between natural transformations, maps between such maps, and so on, that is, maps between maps between maps. Just as the original definitions of Eilenberg and Mac Lane gave a way of thinking about categorical structures and analogies between such structures in different fields, higher category theory promises to allow serious thinking about and study of higher categorical struc- tures that appear in a variety of specific fields. The need for such a language has become apparent, almost simultaneously, in mathematical physics, algebraic geom- etry, computer science, logic, and, of course, category theory. As we shall explain, such a language and a relevant body of results is already implicit throughout al- gebraic topology. In all of these areas, higher categorical structures are there in nature, and one needs a coherent way of thinking about them. To give some feel for how such structures appear, we briefly consider topological quantum field theory (TQFT). A TQFT is a structure-preserving functor from a suitable cobordism category of manifolds to an analogously structured algebraic category. With the usual definitions, the objects of the domain category are closed manifolds of a certain dimension and the maps between them are equivalence classes of cobordisms between them, which are manifolds with boundary in the next higher dimension.
[Show full text]