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One form of the coherence theorem for bicategories states that every bicategory is equivalent to a strict 2-category. Lack’s coherence observation (named for Steve Lack) states that naturally occurring bicategories tend to be equivalent to naturally occurring strict 2-categories.
Instances of Lack’s coherence observation include:
The bicategory Prof of small categories and profunctors is equivalent to the strict 2-category of presheaf categories and cocontinuous functors.
The bicategory Span(C) of spans in a category with pullbacks is equivalent to the strict 2-category of slice categories of and linear polynomial functors. More generally, the bicategory of polynomials in a locally cartesian closed category is equivalent to the strict 2-category of slices and polynomial functors.
The first example is an instance of a more general result. Given a relative pseudomonad on a strict 2-category , the Eilenberg–Moore bicategory? of will also be a strict 2-category, whereas the Kleisli bicategory will usually not be. However, the Kleisli bicategory embeds fully faithfully into the Eilenberg–Moore bicategory, and so will be biequivalent to the full sub-2-category of the Eilenberg–Moore bicategory on the free algebras.
This observation first appears in Example 1.5(k) of
Last revised on July 14, 2022 at 04:10:45. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.