Non-cartesian categorical algebra

["George Janelidze" <janelg@telkomsa.net>]

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to make a remark concerning my CT2008 talk.

First let me recall: A lot of mathematics (e.g. of Galois theory) can be
done in the context of adjoint functors between abstract categories with
finite limits - and since one gets all finite limits our of finite products
and equalizers, one can try a further generalization with monoidal structure
plus equalizers. The point was that this seemingly primitive old idea
actually works very seriously and should be taken as the idea of developing
non-cartesian categorical algebra. And "non-cartesian" is the right idea of
"non-commutative" and "quantum", although what Ross Street means by
"quantum" is more involved and also important. In particular non-cartesian
internal categories are to be taken seriously.

At the end of my talk Jeff Egger told us that he knows someone studied such
generalized internal categories, and later sent me an email with the name:
Marcelo Aguiar; and gave the home page address
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~maguiar/ , and... I realized that it is the third
time I am informed about this work! Recently (winter 2007) I spend two very
nice months in Warsaw invited by Piotr Hajac, and discussing mathematics
with him, Tomasz Brzezinski, Tomasz Maszczyk, and a few others - and, among
other interesting things, Tomasz Brzezinski showed me Marcelo Aguiar's
website, including PhD, where those generalized internal categories were
studied. I also recall now an email message from Steven Chase (from 2002)
where he mentions "...the notion of a category internal to a monoidal
category which was developed by my former doctoral student, Marcelo Aguiar,
in his thesis, "Internal Categories and Quantum Groups" (available on
line...".

In fact the whole story begins, in some sense, with the book [S. U. Chase
and M. E. Sweedler, Hopf algebras and Galois theory, Lecture Notes in
Mathematics 97, Springer 1969], which does not use monoidal categories yet,
but very clearly shows that the commutative case is much easier (for Galois
theory) because it makes tensor product (of algebras) (co)cartesian. There
are many other important further contributions by other authors of different
generations. Knowing them personally, I can name Bodo Pareigis, Stefaan
Caenepeel, Peter Schauenburg, and the aforementioned Polish mathematicians
(although Tomasz Brzezinski is in UK now), but I am not ready to give any
reasonably complete list. There are also things-to-be-corrected happening:
for instance by far not enough comparisons have been made with the
Australian work on abstract monoidal categories, and some authors use words
like "coring"...

George Janelidze