Cauchy convergence in V-normed categories

Abstract

Building on the notion of normed category as suggested by Lawvere, we introduce notions of Cauchy convergence and cocompleteness which differ from proposals in previous works. Key to our approach is to treat them consequentially as categories enriched in the monoidal-closed category of normed sets. Our notions largely lead to the anticipated outcomes when considering individual metric spaces as small normed categories, but they can be challenging when considering some large categories, like those of semi-normed or normed vector spaces and all linear maps, or of generalized metric spaces and all mappings. These are the key example categories discussed in detail in this paper. Working with a general commutative quantale V as a value recipient for norms, rather than only with Lawvere's quantale of the extended real half-line, we observe that the categorically atypical structure gap between objects and morphisms in the example categories is already present in the underlying normed category of the enriching category of V-normed sets. To show that this normed category and, in fact, all presheaf categories over it, are Cauchy cocomplete, we assume the quantale V to satisfy a couple of light alternative extra properties. Of utmost importance to the general theory is the fact that our notion of normed colimit is subsumed by the notion of weighted colimit of enriched category theory. With this theory we are able to prove that all V-normed categories have correct-size Cauchy cocompletions. We also prove a Banach Fixed Point Theorem for contractive endofunctors of Cauchy cocomplete normed categories.