Profunctorial algebras

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Aristote, Quentin, Tarantino, Umberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Aristote, Quentin
Tarantino, Umberto
author_facet Aristote, Quentin
Tarantino, Umberto
contents We provide a bicategorical generalization of Barr's landmark 1970 paper, in which he describes how to extend Set-monads to relations and uses this to characterize topological spaces as the relational algebras of the ultrafilter monad. With two-sided discrete fibrations playing the role of relations in a bicategory, we first describe how to extend pseudomonads on a bicategory to skew monads on its bicategory of two-sided discrete fibrations, and we characterize in terms of exact squares when these extensions are themselves pseudomonads. As a wide class of examples, we show that every Set-monad induces a pseudomonad on the 2-category of categories admitting a skew extension to profunctors, and in a few relevant cases we introduce suitable quotients also extending to profunctors. Among the latter, we then focus on the ultracompletion pseudomonad, whose pseudoalgebras are ultracategories: we characterize the normalized lax algebras of its profunctorial extension as ultraconvergence spaces, a recently-introduced categorification of topological spaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Profunctorial algebras
Aristote, Quentin
Tarantino, Umberto
Category Theory
Logic in Computer Science
18N15 (Primary) 18C10, 03G30, 03C20, 54D80 (Secondary)
We provide a bicategorical generalization of Barr's landmark 1970 paper, in which he describes how to extend Set-monads to relations and uses this to characterize topological spaces as the relational algebras of the ultrafilter monad. With two-sided discrete fibrations playing the role of relations in a bicategory, we first describe how to extend pseudomonads on a bicategory to skew monads on its bicategory of two-sided discrete fibrations, and we characterize in terms of exact squares when these extensions are themselves pseudomonads. As a wide class of examples, we show that every Set-monad induces a pseudomonad on the 2-category of categories admitting a skew extension to profunctors, and in a few relevant cases we introduce suitable quotients also extending to profunctors. Among the latter, we then focus on the ultracompletion pseudomonad, whose pseudoalgebras are ultracategories: we characterize the normalized lax algebras of its profunctorial extension as ultraconvergence spaces, a recently-introduced categorification of topological spaces.
title Profunctorial algebras
topic Category Theory
Logic in Computer Science
18N15 (Primary) 18C10, 03G30, 03C20, 54D80 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22721