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## Groupoid cardinality

Suitably nice groupoids have a numerical invariant attached to them called groupoid cardinality. Groupoid cardinality is closely related to Euler characteristic and can be thought of as providing a notion of integration on groupoids.

There are various situations in mathematics where computing the size of a set is difficult but where that set has a natural groupoid structure and computing its groupoid cardinality turns out to be easier and give a nicer answer. In such situations the groupoid cardinality is also known as “mass,” e.g. in the Smith-Minkowski-Siegel mass formula for lattices. There are related situations in mathematics where one needs to describe a reasonable probability distribution on some class of objects and groupoid cardinality turns out to give the correct such distribution, e.g. the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics for class groups. We will not discuss these situations, but they should be strong evidence that groupoid cardinality is a natural invariant to consider.

## String diagrams, duality, and trace

Previously we introduced string diagrams and saw that they were a convenient way to talk about tensor products, partial compositions of multilinear maps, and symmetries. But string diagrams really prove their use when augmented to talk about duality, which will be described topologically by bending input and output wires. In particular, we will be able to see topologically the sense in which the following four pieces of information are equivalent:

• A linear map $U \to V$,
• A linear map $U \otimes V^{\ast} \to 1$,
• A linear map $V^{\ast} \to U^{\ast}$,
• A linear map $1 \to U^{\ast} \otimes V^{\ast}$.

Using string diagrams we will also give a diagrammatic definition of the trace $\text{tr}(f)$ of an endomorphism $f : V \to V$ of a finite-dimensional vector space, as well as a diagrammatic proof of some of its basic properties.

Below all vector spaces are finite-dimensional and the composition convention from the previous post is still in effect.

## Introduction to string diagrams

Today I would like to introduce a diagrammatic notation for dealing with tensor products and multilinear map. The basic idea for this notation appears to be due to Penrose. It has the advantage of both being widely applicable and easier and more intuitive to work with; roughly speaking, computations are performed by topological manipulations on diagrams, revealing the natural notation to use here is 2-dimensional (living in a plane) rather than 1-dimensional (living on a line).

For the sake of accessibility we will restrict our attention to vector spaces. There are category-theoretic things happening in this post but we will not point them out explicitly. We assume familiarity with the notion of tensor product of vector spaces but not much else.

Below the composition of a map $f : a \to b$ with a map $g : b \to c$ will be denoted $f \circ g : a \to c$ (rather than the more typical $g \circ f$). This will make it easier to translate between diagrams and non-diagrams. All diagrams were drawn in Paper.

My current top candidate for a mathematical concept that should be and is not (as far as I can tell) consistently taught at the advanced undergraduate / beginning graduate level is the notion of a groupoid. Today’s post is a very brief introduction to groupoids together with some suggestions for further reading.

## Split epimorphisms and split monomorphisms

• What is the “easiest way” a morphism can be a monomorphism (resp. epimorphism)?
• What are the absolute monomorphisms (resp. epimorphisms) – that is, the ones which are preserved by every functor?
• A morphism which is both a monomorphism and an epimorphism is not necessarily an isomorphism. Can we replace either “monomorphism” or “epimorphism” by some other notion to repair this?
• If we wanted to generalize surjective functions, why didn’t we define an epimorphism to be a map which is surjective on generalized points?

The answer to all of these questions is the notion of a split monomorphism (resp. split epimorphism), which is the subject of today’s post.

## Internal equivalence relations

For the last few weeks I’ve been working as a counselor at the PROMYS program. The program runs, among other things, a course in abstract algebra, which was a good opportunity for me to get annoyed at the way people normally introduce normal subgroups, which is via the following unmotivated

Definition: A subgroup $N$ of a group $G$ is normal if $gNg^{-1} \subset N$ for all $g \in G$.

It is then proven that normal subgroups are precisely the kernels $N = \phi^{-1}(e)$ of surjective group homomorphisms $\phi : G \to G/N$. In other words, they are precisely the subgroups you can quotient by and get another group. This strikes me as backwards. The motivation to construct quotient groups should come first.

Today I’d like to present an alternate conceptual route to this definition starting from equivalence relations and quotients. This route also leads to ideals in rings and, among other things, highlights the special role of the existence of inverses in the theory of groups and rings (in the latter I mean additive inverses). The categorical setting for this discussion is the notion of a kernel pair and of an internal equivalence relation in a category, but for the sake of accessibility we will not use this language explicitly.

## Centers, 2-categories, and the Eckmann-Hilton argument

The center $Z(G)$ of a group is an interesting construction: it associates to every group $G$ an abelian group $Z(G)$ in what is certainly a canonical way, but not a functorial way: that is, it doesn’t extend (at least in any obvious way) to a functor $\text{Grp} \to \text{Ab}$ (unlike the abelianization $G/[G, G]$). We might wonder, then, exactly what kind of construction the center is.

Of course, it is actually not hard to come up with a rather general example of a canonical but not functorial construction: in any category $C$ we may associate to an object $c \in C$ its automorphism group $\text{Aut}(c)$ or endomorphism monoid $\text{End}(c)$), and this is a canonical construction which again doesn’t extend in an obvious way to a functor $C \to \text{Grp}$ or $C \to \text{Mon}$. (It merely reflects some special part of the bifunctor $\text{Hom}(-, -)$.)

It turns out that the center can actually be thought of in terms of automorphisms (or endomorphisms), not of a group $G$, but of the identity functor $G \to G$, where $G$ is regarded as a category with one object. This definition generalizes, and the resulting general definition has some interesting specializations. Moreover, an important general property is that the center is always abelian, and this has a very elegant proof.

## Euler characteristic as homotopy cardinality

Let $X$ be a finite CW complex with $c_0$ vertices, $c_1$ edges, and in general $c_i$ different $i$-cells. The Euler characteristic

$\displaystyle \chi(X) = \sum_{i \ge 0} (-1)^i c_i$

is a fundamental invariant of $X$, and the observation that it is homotopy invariant is the appropriate generalization of Euler’s formula $V - E + F = 2 = \chi(S^2)$ for a convex polyhedron. But where exactly does this expression come from? The modern story involves the homology groups $H_i(X, \mathbb{Q})$, but actually one can work on a more intuitive level characterized by the following slogan:

The Euler characteristic is a homotopy-invariant generalization of cardinality.

More precisely, the above expression for Euler characteristic can be deduced from three simple axioms:

1. Cardinality: $\chi(\text{pt}) = 1$.
2. Homotopy invariance: If $X \sim Y$, then $\chi(X) = \chi(Y)$.
3. Inclusion-exclusion: Suppose $X$ is the union of two subcomplexes $A, B$ whose intersection $A \cap B$ is a subcomplex of both $A$ and $B$. Then $\chi(X) = \chi(A) + \chi(B) - \chi(A \cap B)$.

Of course, this isn’t enough to conclude that there actually exists an invariant with these properties. Nevertheless, it’s enough to motivate the search for a proof that such an invariant exists.

## SU(2) and the quaternions

The simplest compact Lie group is the circle $S^1 \cong \text{SO}(2)$. Part of the reason it is so simple to understand is that Euler’s formula gives an extremely nice parameterization $e^{ix} = \cos x + i \sin x$ of its elements, showing that it can be understood either in terms of the group of elements of norm $1$ in $\mathbb{C}$ (that is, the unitary group $\text{U}(1)$) or the imaginary subspace of $\mathbb{C}$.

The compact Lie group we are currently interested in is the $3$-sphere $S^3 \cong \text{SU}(2)$. It turns out that there is a picture completely analogous to the picture above, but with $\mathbb{C}$ replaced by the quaternions $\mathbb{H}$: that is, $\text{SU}(2)$ is isomorphic to the group of elements of norm $1$ in $\mathbb{H}$ (that is, the symplectic group $\text{Sp}(1)$), and there is an exponential map from the imaginary subspace of $\mathbb{H}$ to this group. Composing with the double cover $\text{SU}(2) \to \text{SO}(3)$ lets us handle elements of $\text{SO}(3)$ almost as easily as we handle elements of $\text{SO}(2)$.

In order to study the hydrogen atom, we’ll need to know something about the representation theory of the special orthogonal group $\text{SO}(3)$. This post consists of a few preliminaries along the way to doing this. I’ll be somewhat vague about a few things that 1) I don’t have much experience with, and 2) that would detract from the main narrative anyway.