A diagrammatic presentation of the category 3Cob
A category equivalent to the category of 3-dimensional cobordisms is defined in terms of planar diagrams. The operation of composition in this category is completely described via these diagrams.
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Publications and source records attributed to Mladen Zekic.
A category equivalent to the category of 3-dimensional cobordisms is defined in terms of planar diagrams. The operation of composition in this category is completely described via these diagrams.
This paper is addressed to logicians not familiar with category theory. It gives a new proof of coherence for symmetric monoidal closed categories, proven by Kelly and Mac Lane in the early 1970s. We find this result of great importance for proof theory and it is formulated here in pure logical terminology free of categorial notions. Coherence is related to the generality conjecture in general proof theory and we hope that our formulation will make it closer to the proof-theoretical community.
As shown by Abramsky and Coecke, quantum mechanics can be studied in terms of dagger compact closed categories with biproducts. Within this structure, many well-known quantum protocols can be described and their validity can be shown by establishing the commutativity of certain diagrams in that category. In this paper, we propose an explicit realisation of a category with enough structure to check the validity of a certain class of quantum protocols. In order to do this, we construct a category based on 1-dimensional cobordisms with attached elements of a certain group freely generated by a finite set. We use this category as a graphical language, and we show that it is dagger compact closed with biproducts. Then, relying on the coherence result for compact closed categories, proved by Kelly and Laplaza, we show the coherence result, which enables us to check the validity of quantum protocols just by drawing diagrams. In particular, we show the validity of quantum teleportation, entanglement swapping (as formulated in the work of Abramsky and Coecke) and superdense coding protocol.
A coherence result for symmetric monoidal closed categories with biproducts is shown in this paper. It is explained how to prove, by using the same technique, coherence for compact closed categories with biproducts and for dagger compact closed categories with dagger biproducts.
A formal sequent system dealing with Menelaus' configurations is introduced in this paper. The axiomatic sequents of the system stem from 2-cycles of Delta-complexes. The Euclidean and projective interpretations of the sequents are defined and a soundness result is proved. This system is decidable and its provable sequents deliver incidence results. A cyclic operad structure tied to this system is presented by generators and relations.