Monday, 20 August 2007

ct.category theory - What is Yoneda's Lemma a generalization of?

I like to view Yoneda's lemma as a generalization of the description of Galois coverings in topology. To any functor F:CtoSet we can associate its category of elements El(F). Its objects are pairs (x,a), ainC, xinF(a). A morphism f:(x,a)to(y,b) is a morphism f:atob, such that F(f)(x)=y. Such a category is equipped with a natural projection QF:El(F)toC, sending (x,a) to ainC and a morphism in El(F) to the underlying morphism in C. Then it is easy to see that a natural transformation mu:(p;cdot)toF(cdot) is just the same as a morphism of fibrations over C intmu:El(p;cdot)simeqp/CtoEl(F)



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 Nat[(p;cdot);(p;cdot)]. By Yoneda's lemma it equals to HomC(p;p). This is exactly the fibre of p/C over C under the Grothendieck's construction for (p;cdot). The whole automorphism of (p;cdot) is thus determined by the image of 1:ptop. This reminds that an automorphism of Galois covering is uniquely defined by choosing the image of one element in the fibre, thus Aut(MstackrelptoN)=p1(x),;xinN



A morphism of Galois coverings f:XtoY with X connected is likewise uniquely determined (if it exists) by choosing some element of a fibre of Y. If X is contractible, then a morphism always exists. This means that slice categories p/CtoC 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.

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