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.

Vector product and composition algebras in braided monoidal additive categories

This is an account of some work of Markus Rost and his students Dominik Boos and Susanne Maurer. We adapt it to the braided monoidal setting.Comment: 23 page

On monads and warpings

We explain the sense in which a warping on a monoidal category is the same as a pseudomonad on the corresponding one-object bicategory, and we describe extensions of this to the setting of skew monoidal categories: these are a generalization of monoidal categories in which the associativity and unit maps are not required to be invertible. Our analysis leads us to describe a normalization process for skew monoidal categories, which produces a universal skew monoidal category for which the right unit map is invertible.Comment: 15 pages. Version 2: revised based on a very helpful report from the referee. To appear in the Cahiers de Topologie and Geometrie Differentielle Categorique

Triangulations, orientals, and skew monoidal categories

A concrete model of the free skew-monoidal category Fsk on a single generating object is obtained. The situation is clubbable in the sense of G.M. Kelly, so this allows a description of the free skew-monoidal category on any category. As the objects of Fsk are meaningfully bracketed words in the skew unit I and the generating object X, it is necessary to examine bracketings and to find the appropriate kinds of morphisms between them. This leads us to relationships between triangulations of polygons, the Tamari lattice, left and right bracketing functions, and the orientals. A consequence of our description of Fsk is a coherence theorem asserting the existence of a strictly structure-preserving faithful functor from Fsk to the skew-monoidal category of finite non-empty ordinals and first-element-and-order-preserving functions. This in turn provides a complete solution to the word problem for skew monoidal categories.Comment: 48 page

Torsors, herds and flocks

This paper presents non-commutative and structural notions of torsor. The two are related by the machinery of Tannaka-Krein duality

Closed categories, star-autonomy, and monoidal comonads

This paper determines what structure is needed for internal homs in a monoidal category C to be liftable to the category C^G of Eilenberg-Moore coalgebras for a monoidal comonad G on C. We apply this to lift star-autonomy with the view to recasting the definition of quantum groupoid.Comment: 25 page

A skew-duoidal Eckmann-Hilton argument and quantum categories

A general result relating skew monoidal structures and monads is proved. This is applied to quantum categories and bialgebroids. Ordinary categories are monads in the bicategory whose morphisms are spans between sets. Quantum categories were originally defined as monoidal comonads on endomorphism objects in a particular monoidal bicategory M. Then they were shown also to be skew monoidal structures (with an appropriate unit) on objects in M. Now we see in what kind of M quantum categories are merely monads.Comment: 14 pages, dedicated to George Janelidze on the occasion of his 60th birthday; v2 final version, 15 pages, to appear in Applied Categorical Structure