Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Diagram of interdependence
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Motivation for topologists
- Part I Background
- Part II Operads
- Part III n-categories
- Appendices
- A Symmetric structures
- B Coherence for monoidal categories
- C Special cartesian monads
- D Free multicategories
- E Definitions of tree
- F Free strict n-categories
- G Initial operad-with-contraction
- References
- Index of notation
- Index
E - Definitions of tree
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Diagram of interdependence
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Motivation for topologists
- Part I Background
- Part II Operads
- Part III n-categories
- Appendices
- A Symmetric structures
- B Coherence for monoidal categories
- C Special cartesian monads
- D Free multicategories
- E Definitions of tree
- F Free strict n-categories
- G Initial operad-with-contraction
- References
- Index of notation
- Index
Summary
I met this guy
and he looked like he might have been a hat-check clerk
at an ice rink
which in fact
he turned out to be
Laurie Anderson (1982)Trees appear everywhere in higher-dimensional algebra. In this text they were defined in a purely abstract way (2.3.3): tr is the free plain operad on the terminal object of Setℕ, and an n-leafed tree is an element of tr(n). But for the reasons laid out at the beginning of Section 7.3, I give here a ‘concrete’, graph-theoretic, definition of (finite, rooted, planar) tree and sketch a proof that it is equivalent to the abstract definition.
The equivalence
The main subtlety is that the trees we use are not quite finite graphs in the usual sense: some of the edges have a vertex at only one of their ends. (Recall from 2.3.3 that in a tree, an edge with a free end is not the same thing as an edge ending in a vertex.) This suggests the following definitions. Definition E.1.1 A (planar) input-output graph (Fig. E-A(a)) consists of
• a finite set V (the vertices)
[…]
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- Higher Operads, Higher Categories , pp. 396 - 398Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004