Benedikt Ahrens: Displayed Categories

A displayed category over a category C is equivalent to “a category D and functor F : D -> C”, but instead of having a single collection of “objects of D” with a map to the objects of C, the objects are given as a family indexed by objects of C, and similarly for the morphisms. This encapsulates a common way of building categories in practice, by starting with an existing category and adding extra data/properties to the objects and morphisms.

The interest of this seemingly trivial reformulation is that various properties of functors are more naturally defined as properties of the corresponding displayed categories. Fibrations, for example, when defined as certain functors, use equality on objects in their definition. When defined instead as a property of displayed categories, no reference to equality on objects is required. Moreover, almost all examples of fibrations in nature are, in fact, categories whose standard construction can be seen as going via displayed categories.
In this talk I will give an introduction to displayed categories and present various applications.

This is joint work with Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine