Reference. The Univalence Principle

The Univalence Principle is the statement that equivalent mathematical structures are indistinguishable. We prove a general version of this principle that applies to all set-based, categorical, and higher-categorical structures defined in a non-algebraic and space-based style, as well as models of higher-order theories such as topological spaces. In particular, we formulate a general definition of indiscernibility for objects of any such structure, and a corresponding univalence condition that generalizes Rezk’s completeness condition for Segal spaces and ensures that all equivalences of structures are levelwise equivalences. Our work builds on Makkai’s First-Order Logic with Dependent Sorts, but is expressed in Voevodsky’s Univalent Foundations (UF), extending previous work on the Structure Identity Principle and univalent categories in UF. This enables indistinguishability to be expressed simply as identification, and yields a formal theory that is interpretable in classical homotopy theory, but also in other higher topos models. It follows that Univalent Foundations is a fully equivalence-invariant foundation for higher-categorical mathematics, as intended by Voevodsky.

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Cite as @ahrens-2021-the (helia, typst) · \cite{ahrens-2021-the} (LaTeX)
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bibtex · 11 lines
@article{ahrens-2021-the,
  author = {Benedikt Ahrens and Paige Randall North and Michael Shulman and Dimitris Tsementzis},
  title = {The Univalence Principle},
  journal = {Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society},
  publisher = {American Mathematical Society (AMS)},
  year = {2025},
  month = {1},
  volume = {305},
  number = {1541},
  doi = {10.1090/memo/1541}
}
hayagriva YAML (typst)
yaml · 17 lines
ahrens-2021-the:
  type: article
  title: The Univalence Principle
  author:
  - Ahrens, Benedikt
  - North, Paige Randall
  - Shulman, Michael
  - Tsementzis, Dimitris
  date: 2025-01
  serial-number:
    doi: 10.1090/memo/1541
  parent:
    type: periodical
    title: Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society
    publisher: American Mathematical Society (AMS)
    issue: 1541
    volume: 305
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Cites 103 works (8 here)
With notes (8)

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We introduce and develop the notion of displayed categories. A displayed category over a category 𝐶 is equivalent to “a category 𝐷 and functor 𝐹:𝐷→𝐶, but instead of having a single collection of “objects of 𝐷” with a map to the objects of 𝐶, the objects are given as a family indexed by objects of 𝐶, and similarly for the morphisms. This encapsulates a common way of building categories in practice, by starting with an existing category and adding extra data/properties to the objects and morphisms. The interest of this seemingly trivial reformulation is that various properties of functors are more naturally defined as properties of the corresponding displayed categories. Grothendieck fibrations, for example, when defined as certain functors, use equality on objects in their definition. When defined instead as certain displayed categories, no reference to equality on objects is required. Moreover, almost all examples of fibrations in nature are, in fact, categories whose standard construction can be seen as going via displayed categories. We therefore propose displayed categories as a basis for the development of fibrations in the type-theoretic setting, and similarly for various other notions whose classical definitions involve equality on objects. Besides giving a conceptual clarification of such issues, displayed categories also provide a powerful tool in computer formalisation, unifying and abstracting common constructions and proof techniques of category theory, and enabling modular reasoning about categories of multi-component structures. As such, most of the material of this article has been formalised in Coq over the UniMath library, with the aim of providing a practical library for use in further developments.

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Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics hottbook

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