Coherent Presentations of Monoidal Categories

Presentations of categories are a well-known algebraic tool to provide descriptions of categories by means of generators, for objects and morphisms, and relations on morphisms. We generalize here this notion, in order to consider situations where the objects are considered modulo an equivalence relation, which is described by equational generators. When those form a convergent (abstract) rewriting system on objects, there are three very natural constructions that can be used to define the category which is described by the presentation: one consists in turning equational generators into identities (i.e. considering a quotient category), one consists in formally adding inverses to equational generators (i.e. localizing the category), and one consists in restricting to objects which are normal forms. We show that, under suitable coherence conditions on the presentation, the three constructions coincide, thus generalizing celebrated results on presentations of groups, and we extend those conditions to presentations of monoidal categories

Presentations for the punctured mapping class groups in terms of Artin groups

Consider an oriented compact surface F of positive genus, possibly with boundary, and a finite set P of punctures in the interior of F, and define the punctured mapping class group of F relatively to P to be the group of isotopy classes of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms h: F-->F which pointwise fix the boundary of F and such that h(P) = P. In this paper, we calculate presentations for all punctured mapping class groups. More precisely, we show that these groups are isomorphic with quotients of Artin groups by some relations involving fundamental elements of parabolic subgroups.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol1/agt-1-5.abs.htm

Partial mirror symmetry, lattice presentations and algebraic monoids

This is the second in a series of papers that develops the theory of reflection monoids, motivated by the theory of reflection groups. Reflection monoids were first introduced in arXiv:0812.2789. In this paper we study their presentations as abstract monoids. Along the way we also find general presentations for certain join-semilattices (as monoids under join) which we interpret for two special classes of examples: the face lattices of convex polytopes and the geometric lattices, particularly the intersection lattices of hyperplane arrangements. Another spin-off is a general presentation for the Renner monoid of an algebraic monoid, which we illustrate in the special case of the "classical" algebraic monoids.Comment: 41 page