Symmetric Monoidal Smash Products in Homotopy Type Theory

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1. Verfasser: Ljungström, Axel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ljungström, Axel
author_facet Ljungström, Axel
contents In Homotopy Type Theory, few constructions have proved as troublesome as the smash product. While its definition is just as direct as in classical mathematics, one quickly realises that in order to define and reason about functions over iterations of it, one has to verify an exponentially growing number of coherences. This has led to crucial results concerning smash products remaining open. One particularly important such result is the fact that smash products form a (1-coherent) symmetric monoidal product on the universe of pointed types. This fact was used, without a complete proof, by e.g. Brunerie in his PhD thesis to construct the cup product on integral cohomology and is, more generally, a fundamental result in traditional algebraic topology. In this paper, we salvage the situation by introducing a simple informal heuristic for reasoning about functions defined over iterated smash products. We then use the heuristic to verify e.g. the hexagon and pentagon identities, thereby obtaining a proof of symmetric monoidality. We also provide a formal statement of the heuristic in terms of an induction principle concerning the construction of homotopies of functions defined over iterated smash products. The key results presented here have been formalised in the proof assistant Cubical Agda.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Symmetric Monoidal Smash Products in Homotopy Type Theory
Ljungström, Axel
Algebraic Topology
Logic in Computer Science
In Homotopy Type Theory, few constructions have proved as troublesome as the smash product. While its definition is just as direct as in classical mathematics, one quickly realises that in order to define and reason about functions over iterations of it, one has to verify an exponentially growing number of coherences. This has led to crucial results concerning smash products remaining open. One particularly important such result is the fact that smash products form a (1-coherent) symmetric monoidal product on the universe of pointed types. This fact was used, without a complete proof, by e.g. Brunerie in his PhD thesis to construct the cup product on integral cohomology and is, more generally, a fundamental result in traditional algebraic topology. In this paper, we salvage the situation by introducing a simple informal heuristic for reasoning about functions defined over iterated smash products. We then use the heuristic to verify e.g. the hexagon and pentagon identities, thereby obtaining a proof of symmetric monoidality. We also provide a formal statement of the heuristic in terms of an induction principle concerning the construction of homotopies of functions defined over iterated smash products. The key results presented here have been formalised in the proof assistant Cubical Agda.
title Symmetric Monoidal Smash Products in Homotopy Type Theory
topic Algebraic Topology
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03523