I like to view Yoneda's lemma as a generalization of the description of Galois coverings in topology. To any functor we can associate its category of elements . Its objects are pairs , , . A morphism is a morphism , such that . Such a category is equipped with a natural projection , sending to and a morphism in to the underlying morphism in . Then it is easy to see that a natural transformation is just the same as a morphism of fibrations over
This is an example of Grothendieck's construction, applied to set-valued functors. It is itself a categorical version of the correspondence between sheaves of sets and their etale spaces in algebraic geometry.
Consider for example . By Yoneda's lemma it equals to . This is exactly the fibre of over under the Grothendieck's construction for . The whole automorphism of is thus determined by the image of . This reminds that an automorphism of Galois covering is uniquely defined by choosing the image of one element in the fibre, thus
A morphism of Galois coverings with connected is likewise uniquely determined (if it exists) by choosing some element of a fibre of . If is contractible, then a morphism always exists. This means that slice categories are actually similar to contractible fibrations. I don't know how far the analogy goes, but via the classifying space functor slice categories really map to contractible spaces, because they have initial objects.
No comments:
Post a Comment