Dual (category theory)
Correspondence between properties of a category and its opposite
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Given a concrete category C, it is often the case that the opposite category Cop per se is abstract. Cop need not be a category that arises from mathematical practice. In this case, another category D is also termed to be in duality with C if D and Cop are equivalent as categories.
In the case when C and its opposite Cop are equivalent, such a category is self-dual.
Formal definition
We define the elementary language of category theory as the two-sorted first order language with objects and morphisms as distinct sorts, together with the relations of an object being the source or target of a morphism and a symbol for composing two morphisms.
Let σ be any statement in this language. We form the dual σop as follows:
- Interchange each occurrence of "source" in σ with "target".
- Interchange the order of composing morphisms. That is, replace each occurrence of with
Informally, these conditions state that the dual of a statement is formed by reversing arrows and compositions.
Duality is the observation that σ is true for some category C if and only if σop is true for Cop.
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Examples
- A morphism is a monomorphism if implies . Performing the dual operation, we get the statement that implies This reversed morphism is by definition precisely an epimorphism. In short, the property of being a monomorphism is dual to the property of being an epimorphism.
Applying duality, this means that a morphism in some category C is a monomorphism if and only if the reverse morphism in the opposite category Cop (composed by reversing all morphisms in C) is an epimorphism.
- An example comes from reversing the direction of inequalities in a partial order. So, if X is a set and ≤ a partial order relation, we can define a new partial order relation ≤new by
- x ≤new y if and only if y ≤ x.
This example on orders is a special case, since partial orders correspond to a certain kind of category in which Hom(A,B) (a set of all morphisms from A to B of a category) can have at most one element. In applications to logic, this then looks like a very general description of negation (that is, proofs run in the opposite direction). For example, if we take the opposite of a lattice, we will find that meets and joins have their roles interchanged. This is an abstract form of De Morgan's laws, or of duality applied to lattices.
- Limits and colimits are dual notions.
- Fibrations and cofibrations are examples of dual notions in algebraic topology and homotopy theory. In this context, the duality is often called Eckmann–Hilton duality.