University of Sydney Algebra Seminar

Ross Street (Macquarie University)

Friday 19th October, 12:05-12:55pm, Carslaw 173

Variations on the monoidal theme

The talk is about mathematical structures generalizing monoids in some way. These include monoidal categories, monoidal functors, monoids in monoidal categories, duoidal categories, skew-monoidal categories, and monoidal bicategories. Structures such as quantum groupoids, bialgebroids, and topological field theories become examples. The framework can be used to overcome obstacles caused by such things as the inability to calculate all simple objects in a fusion category.