P.R. North
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6 records found
1
From Semantics to Syntax
A Type Theory for Comprehension Categories
Recent models of intensional type theory have been constructed in algebraic weak factorization systems (AWFSs). AWFSs give rise to comprehension categories that feature non-trivial morphisms between types; these morphisms are not used in the standard interpretation of Martin-Löf type theory in comprehension categories. We develop a type theory that internalizes morphisms between types, reflecting this semantic feature back into syntax. Our type theory comes with Π-, Σ-, and identity types. We discuss how it can be viewed as an extension of Martin-Löf type theory with coercive subtyping, as sketched by Coraglia and Emmenegger. We furthermore define semantic structure that interprets our type theory and prove a soundness result. Finally, we exhibit many examples of the semantic structure, yielding a plethora of interpretations.
Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides a formal framework for understanding the relationship between mathematical structures. To this end, a category not only incorporates the data of the desired objects, but also "morphisms", which capture how different objects interact with each other. Category theory has found many applications in mathematics and in computer science, for example in functional programming. Double categories are a natural generalization of categories which incorporate the data of two separate classes of morphisms, allowing a more nuanced representation of relationships and interactions between objects. Similar to category theory, double categories have been successfully applied to various situations in mathematics and computer science, in which objects naturally exhibit two types of morphisms. Examples include categories themselves, but also lenses, petri nets, and spans. While categories have already been formalized in a variety of proof assistants, double categories have received far less attention. In this paper we remedy this situation by presenting a formalization of double categories via the proof assistant Coq, relying on the Coq UniMath library. As part of this work we present two equivalent formalizations of the definition of a double category, an unfolded explicit definition and a second definition which exhibits excellent formal properties via 2-sided displayed categories. As an application of the formal approach we establish a notion of univalent double category along with a univalence principle: equivalences of univalent double categories coincide with their identities.
Bicategorical type theory
Semantics and syntax
We develop semantics and syntax for bicategorical type theory. Bicategorical type theory features contexts, types, terms, and directed reductions between terms. This type theory is naturally interpreted in a class of structured bicategories. We start by developing the semantics, in the form of comprehension bicategories. Examples of comprehension bicategories are plentiful; we study both specific examples as well as classes of examples constructed from other data. From the notion of comprehension bicategory, we extract the syntax of bicategorical type theory, that is, judgment forms and structural inference rules. We prove soundness of the rules by giving an interpretation in any comprehension bicategory. The semantic aspects of our work are fully checked in the Coq proof assistant, based on the UniMath library.
C-systems were defined by Cartmell as models of generalized algebraic theories. B-systems were defined by Voevodsky in his quest to formulate and prove an initiality conjecture for type theories. They play a crucial role in Voevodsky's construction of a syntactic C-system from a term monad. In this work, we construct an equivalence between the category of C-systems and the category of B-systems, thus proving a conjecture by Voevodsky.