Category theory formalizes mathematical structure and its concepts in terms of a labeled directed graph called a category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows. A category has two basic properties: the ability to compose the arrows associatively, and the existence of an identity arrow for each object. The language of category theory has been used to formalize concepts of other high-level abstractions such as sets, rings, and groups. Informally, category theory is a general theory of functions.
In mathematics, an abelian category is a category in which morphisms and objects can be added and in which kernels and cokernels exist and have desirable properties. The motivating prototypical example of an abelian category is the category of abelian groups, Ab. The theory originated in an effort to unify several cohomology theories by Alexander Grothendieck and independently in the slightly earlier work of David Buchsbaum. Abelian categories are very stable categories; for example they are regular and they satisfy the snake lemma. The class of abelian categories is closed under several categorical constructions, for example, the category of chain complexes of an abelian category, or the category of functors from a small category to an abelian category are abelian as well. These stability properties make them inevitable in homological algebra and beyond; the theory has major applications in algebraic geometry, cohomology and pure category theory. Abelian categories are named after Niels Henrik Abel.
In mathematics, an embedding is one instance of some mathematical structure contained within another instance, such as a group that is a subgroup.
In category theory, an epimorphism is a morphism f : X → Y that is right-cancellative in the sense that, for all objects Z and all morphisms g1, g2: Y → Z,
In mathematics, specifically in category theory, a pre-abelian category is an additive category that has all kernels and cokernels.
In mathematics, a complete category is a category in which all small limits exist. That is, a category C is complete if every diagram F : J → C has a limit in C. Dually, a cocomplete category is one in which all small colimits exist. A bicomplete category is a category which is both complete and cocomplete.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and guide to category theory, the area of study in mathematics that examines in an abstract way the properties of particular mathematical concepts, by formalising them as collections of objects and arrows, where these collections satisfy certain basic conditions. Many significant areas of mathematics can be formalised as categories, and the use of category theory allows many intricate and subtle mathematical results in these fields to be stated, and proved, in a much simpler way than without the use of categories.
In mathematics, the category of topological spaces, often denoted Top, is the category whose objects are topological spaces and whose morphisms are continuous maps. This is a category because the composition of two continuous maps is again continuous, and the identity function is continuous. The study of Top and of properties of topological spaces using the techniques of category theory is known as categorical topology.
In category theory, a branch of mathematics, a pushout is the colimit of a diagram consisting of two morphisms f : Z → X and g : Z → Y with a common domain. The pushout consists of an object P along with two morphisms X → P and Y → P that complete a commutative square with the two given morphisms f and g. In fact, the defining universal property of the pushout essentially says that the pushout is the "most general" way to complete this commutative square. Common notations for the pushout are and .
In category theory, a branch of mathematics, a pullback is the limit of a diagram consisting of two morphisms f : X → Z and g : Y → Z with a common codomain. The pullback is often written
In computer science, graph transformation, or graph rewriting, concerns the technique of creating a new graph out of an original graph algorithmically. It has numerous applications, ranging from software engineering to layout algorithms and picture generation.
In category theory, a regular category is a category with finite limits and coequalizers of a pair of morphisms called kernel pairs, satisfying certain exactness conditions. In that way, regular categories recapture many properties of abelian categories, like the existence of images, without requiring additivity. At the same time, regular categories provide a foundation for the study of a fragment of first-order logic, known as regular logic.
In category theory, a span, roof or correspondence is a generalization of the notion of relation between two objects of a category. When the category has all pullbacks, spans can be considered as morphisms in a category of fractions.
In mathematics, an exact category is a concept of category theory due to Daniel Quillen which is designed to encapsulate the properties of short exact sequences in abelian categories without requiring that morphisms actually possess kernels and cokernels, which is necessary for the usual definition of such a sequence.
In category theory, the concept of an element, or a point, generalizes the more usual set theoretic concept of an element of a set to an object of any category. This idea often allows restating of definitions or properties of morphisms given by a universal property in more familiar terms, by stating their relation to elements. Some very general theorems, such as Yoneda's lemma and the Mitchell embedding theorem, are of great utility for this, by allowing one to work in a context where these translations are valid. This approach to category theory, in particular the use of the Yoneda lemma in this way, is due to Grothendieck, and is often called the method of the functor of points.
In mathematics, a topos is a category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space. Topoi behave much like the category of sets and possess a notion of localization; they are a direct generalization of point-set topology. The Grothendieck topoi find applications in algebraic geometry; the more general elementary topoi are used in logic.
In mathematics, particularly in category theory, a morphism is a structure-preserving map from one mathematical structure to another one of the same type. The notion of morphism recurs in much of contemporary mathematics. In set theory, morphisms are functions; in linear algebra, linear transformations; in group theory, group homomorphisms; in topology, continuous functions, and so on.
In computer science, double pushout graph rewriting refers to a mathematical framework for graph rewriting. It was introduced as one of the first algebraic approaches to graph rewriting in the article "Graph-grammars: An algebraic approach" (1973). It has since been generalized to allow rewriting structures which are not graphs, and to handle negative application conditions, among other extensions.
In algebraic K-theory, the K-theory of a categoryC is a sequence of abelian groups Ki(C) associated to it. If C is an abelian category, there is no need for extra data, but in general it only makes sense to speak of K-theory after specifying on C a structure of an exact category, or of a Waldhausen category, or of a dg-category, or possibly some other variants. Thus, there are several constructions of those groups, corresponding to various kinds of structures put on C. Traditionally, the K-theory of C is defined to be the result of a suitable construction, but in some contexts there are more conceptual definitions. For instance, the K-theory is a 'universal additive invariant' of dg-categories and small stable ∞-categories.
In mathematics, specifically in category theory, a quasi-abelian category is a pre-abelian category in which the pushout of a kernel along arbitrary morphisms is again a kernel and, dually, the pullback of a cokernel along arbitrary morphisms is again a cokernel.
