From: Peter Freyd <pjf@saul.cis.upenn.edu>
To: categories@mta.ca
Subject: dualities
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:14:14 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <200604291414.k3TEEEPt012831@saul.cis.upenn.edu> (raw)
On the subject of favorite dualities:
Surely the most important are the self-dualities and the most
important of these (so important we stop noticing it as we age) is the
category of finite-dimensional vector spaces over a given field.
Next is Pontryagin's: the category of locally compact groups. The
original Pontryagin duality easily generalizes: the category of
locally compact modules over a given commutative ring is self-dual.
(In the non-commutative case one also obtains a duality but not a
self-duality -- unless, of course, the ring is self-dual.) A corollary
is that the category of discrete left R-modules is dual to the
category of compact right R-modules. (For 50 years I've been trying to
turn this into an exercise in abelian categories. There's a nice
reduction down to the proposition that R/Z is a cogenerator for the
category of compact abelian groups, but that fact seems to require
some non-trivial functional analysis.) Strange that two of the most
important "dualities" are both Pontryagin's. The other is in algebraic
topology theory.
Then, of course there's my present favorite: the category of finitely
presented group-valued functors from the category of finitely
presented modules over a commutative ring.
next reply other threads:[~2006-04-29 14:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-04-29 14:14 Peter Freyd [this message]
2006-04-30 16:56 dualities Mamuka Jibladze
2006-04-30 19:28 dualities Vaughan Pratt
2006-05-01 11:46 dualities K C H Mackenzie
2006-05-01 19:06 dualities Michael Barr
2006-05-01 20:02 dualities Ronnie Brown
2006-05-02 5:39 dualities Vaughan Pratt
2006-05-02 22:05 dualities John Baez
2006-05-03 16:40 dualities Vaughan Pratt
2006-05-04 6:39 dualities Vaughan Pratt
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