Objective Mackey and Tambara functors via parametrized categories

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Street, Ross
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Street, Ross
author_facet Street, Ross
contents The first word in the title is intended in a sense suggested by Lawvere and Schanuel whereby finite sets are objective natural numbers. At the objective level, the axioms defining abstract Mackey and Tambara functors are categorically familiar. The first step was taken by Harald Lindner in 1976 when he recognized that Mackey functors, defined as pairs of functors, were single functors with domain a category of spans. We define objective Mackey and objective Tambara functors as parametrized categories which have local finite products and satisfy some parametrized completeness and cocompleteness restriction. However, we can replace the original parametrizing base for objective Mackey functors by a bicategory of spans while the replacement for objective Tambara functors is a bicategory obtained by iterating the span construction; these iterated spans are polynomials. There is an objective Mackey functor of ordinary Mackey functors. We show that there is a distributive law relating objective Mackey functors to objective Tambara functors analogous to the distributive law relating abelian groups to commutative rings. We remark on hom enrichment matters involving the 2-category $\mathrm{Cat}_{+}$ of categories admitting finite coproducts and functors preserving them, both as a closed base and as a skew-closed base.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_02260
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Objective Mackey and Tambara functors via parametrized categories
Street, Ross
Category Theory
18M10, 18N10, 20J99, 20C05, 18M05, 18N25
The first word in the title is intended in a sense suggested by Lawvere and Schanuel whereby finite sets are objective natural numbers. At the objective level, the axioms defining abstract Mackey and Tambara functors are categorically familiar. The first step was taken by Harald Lindner in 1976 when he recognized that Mackey functors, defined as pairs of functors, were single functors with domain a category of spans. We define objective Mackey and objective Tambara functors as parametrized categories which have local finite products and satisfy some parametrized completeness and cocompleteness restriction. However, we can replace the original parametrizing base for objective Mackey functors by a bicategory of spans while the replacement for objective Tambara functors is a bicategory obtained by iterating the span construction; these iterated spans are polynomials. There is an objective Mackey functor of ordinary Mackey functors. We show that there is a distributive law relating objective Mackey functors to objective Tambara functors analogous to the distributive law relating abelian groups to commutative rings. We remark on hom enrichment matters involving the 2-category $\mathrm{Cat}_{+}$ of categories admitting finite coproducts and functors preserving them, both as a closed base and as a skew-closed base.
title Objective Mackey and Tambara functors via parametrized categories
topic Category Theory
18M10, 18N10, 20J99, 20C05, 18M05, 18N25
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02260