Australian Category Seminar

Quantum Sets and Finiteness Spaces

Richard Blute·6 March 2024

We look at the possibility of extending the work of Coecke, Pavlovic, Vicary and others on the theory of quantum sets to infinite-dimensions. In previous work, those authors showed that the category of commutative dagger-Frobenius algebras in the category of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces is equivalent to the category of finite sets. This allows one to have a notion of finite set in more general monoidal categories. But the extension of these ideas to infinite dimensions requires new structures. I’m going to suggest that Ehrhard’s finiteness spaces are a sensible possibility. Rather than Hilbert spaces, one works in a category of Lefschetz topological spaces, which give a *-autonomous category of topological vector spaces. This work is a summary of ongoing discussions with J.S.Lemay.

Back