Diassociative algebras and Milnor's invariants for tangles

We extend Milnor's mu-invariants of link homotopy to ordered (classical or virtual) tangles. Simple combinatorial formulas for mu-invariants are given in terms of counting trees in Gauss diagrams. Invariance under Reidemeister moves corresponds to axioms of Loday's diassociative algebra. The relation of tangles to diassociative algebras is formulated in terms of a morphism of corresponding operads.Comment: 17 pages, many figures; v2: several typos correcte

Skew-closed categories

Spurred by the new examples found by Kornel Szlach\'anyi of a form of lax monoidal category, the author felt the time ripe to publish a reworking of Eilenberg-Kelly's original paper on closed categories appropriate to the laxer context. The new examples are connected with bialgebroids. With Stephen Lack, we have also used the concept to give an alternative definition of quantum category and quantum groupoid. Szlach\'anyi has called the lax notion {\em skew monoidal}. This paper defines {\em skew closed category}, proves Yoneda lemmas for categories enriched over such, and looks at closed cocompletion.Comment: Version 2 corrects a mistake in axiom (2.4) noticed by Ignacio Lopez Franco. Only the corrected axiom was used later in the paper so no other consequential change was needed. A few obvious typos have been corrected. Some material on weighted colimits, composite modules and skew-promonoidal categories has been added. Version 3 adds Example 23 and corrects a few typos.

Partial Horn logic and cartesian categories

A logic is developed in which function symbols are allowed to represent partial functions. It has the usual rules of logic (in the form of a sequent calculus) except that the substitution rule has to be modified. It is developed here in its minimal form, with equality and conjunction, as “partial Horn logic”. Various kinds of logical theory are equivalent: partial Horn theories, “quasi-equational” theories (partial Horn theories without predicate symbols), cartesian theories and essentially algebraic theories. The logic is sound and complete with respect to models in , and sound with respect to models in any cartesian (finite limit) category. The simplicity of the quasi-equational form allows an easy predicative constructive proof of the free partial model theorem for cartesian theories: that if a theory morphism is given from one cartesian theory to another, then the forgetful (reduct) functor from one model category to the other has a left adjoint. Various examples of quasi-equational theory are studied, including those of cartesian categories and of other classes of categories. For each quasi-equational theory another, , is constructed, whose models are cartesian categories equipped with models of . Its initial model, the “classifying category” for , has properties similar to those of the syntactic category, but more precise with respect to strict cartesian functors