Wednesday, 3 January 2007

ct.category theory - measure spaces as presheaves?

I recently had the idea that maybe measure spaces could be viewed as sheaves, since they attach things, specifically real numbers, to sets...



But at least as far as I can tell, it doesn't quite work - if (X,Sigma,mu) is a measure space and X is also given the topology Sigma, then we do get a presheaf M:O(X)rightarrowmathbbRgeq0, where mathbbRgeq0 is the poset of non-negative real numbers given the structure of a category, and M(U)=mu(U), and M(UsubseteqV) = the unique map "geq" from mu(V) to mu(U), but this is not a sheaf because for an open cover {Ui} of an open set U, mu(U) is in general not equal to sup mu(Ui) (and sup is the product in mathbbR).



First off, is the above reasoning correct? I'm still quite a beginner in category theory, but I've seen on Wikipedia something about a sheafification functor - does applying that yield anything meaningful/interesting? Does anyone have good references for measure theory from a category theory perspective, or neat examples of how this perspective is helpful?

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