Re: String diagrams, adjunction and autonomous categories.

[Dusko Pavlovic <Dusko.Pavlovic@comlab.ox.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2010, Michael Shulman wrote:

> On the other hand, am I right that you (John) have also written about
> string diagrams in closed (non-autonomous) monoidal categories? Those
> are a bit subtler, and I don't recall them in the work of Joyal and
> Street (am I wrong?).

speaking of coherence in closed categories, i was always under the
impression that kelly and maclane, while writing their 1971 JPAA paper,
and the later one (1979?) secretly drew string diagrams on the side, and
then translated them into categorical diagrams. at least for
counterexamples, this works. and in the kelly-laplaza paper about
compact/autonomous categories: the free construction is expressed in terms
of strings, but i guess at the time it was easier to describe them in
words, than to wait for the publisher to typeset your stings for you.

maybe i am projecting back. or maybe category theory has grown so old that
some things are easier to reconstruct than to remember :)

-- dusko



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