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Saturday, April 12, 2025

Limit as right adjoint functor

Let I be a small category and C be a complete category, and let us consider the functor category Fun(I,C).

Let us define lim as a functor from Fun(I,C) to C as follows:

For all FFun(I,C), we have lim:FlimFC. For a morphism η:FG, we induce the morphism limη:limFlimG via the universal property of limG. Since the natural transformation η will trans a cone over F to cone over G. Easy to see that we do define a functor here.

Let us define its left adjoint functor Δ:CFun(I,C)as follows:

For all XC, we define Δ(X) to be the constant functor. i.e. iOb(I),Δ(X)(i)=X and maps all the morphism to idX.

Proposition. lim is the right adjoint of Δ.

Proof.

We need to prove that

HomFun(I,C)(Δ(X),F)HomC(X,limF)

Each η:Δ(X)F gives you a cone over F, which is bijectively and naturally correpsonds to a morphism from X to limF.

 

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