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14 - Isomorphisms

from Part Two - Doing Category Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Eugenia Cheng
Affiliation:
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter begins Part II of the book, in which we build on the basic definition of a category and think about particular types of structure that might be of interest in any given category. This chapter is about how category theory provides a more nuanced approach to sameness, called isomorphism. We define inverses and isomorphisms. We give a sense in which a category treats isomorphic objects as the same. We then study isomorphisms of sets and show that the categorical definition corresponds to the elementary notion of bijection (where “elementary” means “defined with reference to elements”). We then look at isomorphisms of monoids, groups, and partially ordered sets, showing that these are just structure-preserving maps that also happen to be a bijection, and we discuss how these exhibit things with the same structure. We show that the situation is different for topological spaces, as not every bijective continuous map has a continuous inverse. We briefly touch on the idea of isomorphisms of categories, explaining that this is not the best level of sameness of categories. We finish by mentioning further topics: groupoids, categorical uniqueness, and categorification.

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Chapter
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The Joy of Abstraction
An Exploration of Math, Category Theory, and Life
, pp. 165 - 185
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Isomorphisms
  • Eugenia Cheng, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Book: The Joy of Abstraction
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769389.018
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  • Isomorphisms
  • Eugenia Cheng, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Book: The Joy of Abstraction
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769389.018
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Isomorphisms
  • Eugenia Cheng, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  • Book: The Joy of Abstraction
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769389.018
Available formats
×