"Spider" is a nickname of special Frobenius algebras, a fundamental structure from mathematics, physics, and computer science. Pregroups are a fundamental structure from linguistics. Pregroups and spiders have been used together in natural language processing: one for syntax, the other for semantics. It turns out that pregroups themselves can be characterized as pointed spiders in the category of preordered relations, where they naturally arise from grammars. The other way around, preordered spider algebras in general can be characterized as unions of pregroups. This extends the characterization of relational spider algebras as disjoint unions of groups. The compositional framework that emerged with the results suggests new ways to understand and apply the basis structures in machine learning and data analysis.
We define a coherent adjunction in a strict $3$-category and we use string diagrams to show that any adjunction can be extended to a coherent adjunction in an essentially unique way.
One goal of applied category theory is to understand open systems. We compare two ways of describing open systems as cospans equipped with extra data. First, given a functor $L \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathsf{X}$, a "structured cospan" is a diagram in $\mathsf{X}$ of the form $L(a) \rightarrow x \leftarrow L(b)$. If $\mathsf{A}$ and $\mathsf{X}$ have finite colimits and $L$ preserves them, it is known that there is a symmetric monoidal double category whose objects are those of $\mathsf{A}$ and whose horizontal 1-cells are structured cospans. Second, given a pseudofunctor $F \colon \mathsf{A} \to \mathbf{Cat}$, a "decorated cospan" is a diagram in $\mathsf{A}$ of the form $a \rightarrow m \leftarrow b$ together with an object of $F(m)$. Generalizing the work of Fong, we show that if $\mathsf{A}$ has finite colimits and $F \colon (\mathsf{A},+) \to (\mathsf{Cat},\times)$ is symmetric lax monoidal, there is a symmetric monoidal double category whose objects are those of $\mathsf{A}$ and whose horizontal 1-cells are decorated cospans. We prove that under certain conditions, these two constructions become isomorphic when we take $\mathsf{X} = \int F$ to be the Grothendieck category of $F$. We illustrate these ideas with applications to electrical circuits, Petri nets, dynamical systems and epidemiological modeling.
Urn models play an important role to express various basic ideas in probability theory. Here we extend this urn model with tubes. An urn contains coloured balls, which can be drawn with probabilities proportional to the numbers of balls of each colour. For each colour a tube is assumed. These tubes have different sizes (lengths). The idea is that after drawing a ball from the urn it is dropped in the urn of the corresponding colour. We consider two associated probability distributions. The first-full distribution on colours gives for each colour the probability that the corresponding tube is full first, before any of the other tubes. The negative distribution on natural numbers captures for a number k the probability that all tubes are full for the first time after k draws. This paper uses multisets to systematically describe these first-full and negative distributions in the urns & tubes setting, in fully multivariate form, for all three standard drawing modes (multinomial, hypergeometric, and Polya).
Many mathematical objects can be represented as functors from finitely-presented categories $\mathsf{C}$ to $\mathsf{Set}$. For instance, graphs are functors to $\mathsf{Set}$ from the category with two parallel arrows. Such functors are known informally as $\mathsf{C}$-sets. In this paper, we describe and implement an extension of $\mathsf{C}$-sets having data attributes with fixed types, such as graphs with labeled vertices or real-valued edge weights. We call such structures "acsets," short for "attributed $\mathsf{C}$-sets." Derived from previous work on algebraic databases, acsets are a joint generalization of graphs and data frames. They also encompass more elaborate graph-like objects such as wiring diagrams and Petri nets with rate constants. We develop the mathematical theory of acsets and then describe a generic implementation in the Julia programming language, which uses advanced language features to achieve performance comparable with specialized data structures.
