The geometry of oriented cubes

Abstract

This reports on the fundamental objects revealed by Ross Street, which he called `orientals'. Street's work was in part inspired by Robert's attempts to use N-category ideas to construct nets of C*-algebras in Minkowski space for applications to relativistic quantum field theory: Roberts' additional challenge was that `no amount of staring at the low dimensional cocycle conditions would reveal the pattern for higher dimensions'. This report takes up this challenge, presenting a natural inductive construction of explicit cubical cocyle conditions, and gives three ways in which the simplicial ones can be derived from these. (A dual string-diagram version of this work, giving rise to a Pascal's triangle of diagrams for cocycle conditions, has been described elsewhere by Street). A consequence of this work is that the Yang-Baxter equation, the `pentagon of pentagons', and higher simplex equations, are in essence different manifestations of the same underlying abstract structure. There has been recent interest in higher-categories, by computer scientists investigating concurrency theory, as well as by physicists, among others. The dual `string' version of this paper makes clear the relationship with higher-dimensional simplex equations in physics. Much work in this area has been done since these notes were written: no attempt has been made to update the original report. However, all diagrams have been redrawn by computer, replacing all original hand-drawn pictures.