Saunders Mac Lane Categories for the Working Mathematician Second Edition KG) SpringerPengides A hetenna 9 Saunders Mac Lane Professor Emeritus Department of Mathematics University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637-1514 USA Editorial Board S, Axler F.W. Gehring K.A. Ribet Mathematics Mathematics Mathematics Department Department Department San Francisco State East Hall University of California University University of Michigan at Berkeley San Francisco, CA 94132 Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Berkeley, CA 94720-3840 USA USA USA Mathematics Subject Classification (1991): 18-01 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mac Lane, Saunders, 1909~ Categories for the working mathematician/Saunders Mac Lane. — 2nd ed. p. cm.—(Graduate texts in mathematics; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-387-98403-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Categories (Mathematics) I. Title. Il. Series. QA169.M33_ 1998 512!.55—de21 97-45229 Printed on acid-free paper. Portions of this book have been previously published: © 1969, 1970 by Saunders Mac Lane. © 1998, 1971 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, ‘New York, NY 10010, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, etc., in this publication, even if the former are not especially identified, is not to be taken as a sign that such names, as understood by the Trade Marks and Merchandise Marks Act, may accordingly be used freely by anyone. Production managed by Francine McNeill; manufacturing supervised by Thomas King. Typeset by Asco Trade Typesetting Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound by Braun-Brumfield, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI. Printed in the United States of America. 987654321 ISBN 0-387-98403-8 Springer-Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg SPIN 10661688Preface to the Second Edition This second edition of “Categories Work’ adds two new chapters on topics of active interest. One is on symmetric monoidal categories and braided monoidal categories and the coherence theorems for them—items of interest in their own right and also in view of their use in string theory in quantum field theory. The second new chapter describes 2-categories and the higher-dimensional categories that have recently come into promi- nence. In addition, the bibliography has been expanded to cover some of the many other recent advances conceming categories. The earlier 10 chapters have been lightly revised, clarifying a number of points, in many cases due to helpful suggestions from George Janelidze. In Chapter III, I have added a description of the colimits of representable functors, while Chapter IV now includes a brief description of character- istic functions of subsets and of the elementary topoi. Dune Acres, March 27, 1997 Saunders Mac Lane