Mathematics Commons^™

Extending Set Functors To Generalised Metric Spaces, Adriana Balan, Alexander Kurz, Jiří Velebil

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

For a commutative quantale V, the category V-cat can be perceived as a category of generalised metric spaces and non-expanding maps. We show that any type constructor T (formalised as an endofunctor on sets) can be extended in a canonical way to a type constructor T_V on V-cat. The proof yields methods of explicitly calculating the extension in concrete examples, which cover well-known notions such as the Pompeiu-Hausdorff metric as well as new ones.

Conceptually, this allows us to to solve the same recursive domain equation X ≅ TX in different categories (such as sets and metric spaces) and …