geometric representation theory
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A quiver (Gabriel 72) is a collection of edges which may stretch between (ordered) pairs of “points”, called vertices. Hence a quiver is a kind of graph, often called a directed graph (or digraph) by category theorists.
The term “quiver” (German: Köcher) for a directed graph is due to Gabriel 72, where it says on the first page:
For such a 4-tuple we propose the term quiver, and not graph, since there are already too many notions attached to the latter word.
While therefore, as concepts in themselves, quiver and directed graph are just the same, using the term quiver serves to indicate certain constructions that one is interested in (a concept with an attitude), notably the corresponding quiver representations which much of the theory revolves around. The key result here is Gabriel's theorem from the same article Gabriel 72 that introduced the terminology quiver.
On the other hand, beware that in graph theory, the term “directed graph” is often taken to mean that there is at most one edge from one vertex to another. To emphasize that a quiver allows more edges between vertices one may speak of directed pseudographs. See at directed graph for more.
From yet another perspective, quivers/directed pseudographs are also like small categories with identity morphisms and composition forgotten. Conversely, a small category may be regarded as a quiver/directed pseudograph equipped with extra structure. Formally this is witnessed by a forgetful functor
where Quiv is the category of quivers and Cat is the category of (small strict) categories. Moreover, this forgetful functor has a left adjoint
sending each quiver to the free category on that quiver.
The walking quiver1 is the category with
one object , called the object of vertices;
one object , called the object of edges;
two morphisms , called the source and target;
together with identity morphisms.
More generally, a quiver in a category is a functor .
The category of quivers in , Quiv, is the functor category , where:
objects are functors ,
morphisms are natural transformations between such functors.
In the basic case where is Set, the category Quiv(Set) is equivalent to the category of presheaves on . So: the category of quivers, Quiv, is the category of presheaves on the category .
A quiver consists of two sets (the set of edges of ), (the set of vertices of ) and two functions
(the source and target functions). More generally, a quiver internal to a category (more simply, in a category) consists of two objects , and two morphisms .
If and are two quivers in a category , a morphism is a pair of morphisms , such that and .
In graph theory, a quiver is often (cf. p. 4 or Figure 2-2) called a directed pseudograph (or some variation on that theme), but category theorists often just call them directed graphs.
Let and .
A quiver in is a presheaf on with values in .
A quiver is a globular set which is concentrated in the first two degrees.
A quiver can have distinct edges such that and . A quiver can also have loops, namely, edges with .
A quiver is complete? if for any pair of vertices , there exists a unique directed edge with .
Saying quiver instead of directed (multi)graph indicates focus on a certain set of operation intended on that graph. Notably there is the notion of a quiver representation.
Now, one sees that a representation of a graph in the sense of quiver representation is nothing but a functor from the free category on the quiver :
Given a graph with collection of vertices and collection of edges , there is the free category on the graph whose collection of objects coincides with the collection of vertices, and whose collection of morphisms consists of finite sequences of edges in that fit together head-to-tail (also known as paths). The composition operation in this free category is the concatenation of sequences of edges.
Here we are taking advantage of the adjunction between Cat (the category of small categories) and Quiv (the category of directed graphs). Namely, any category has an underlying directed graph:
and the left adjoint of this functor gives the free category on a directed graph:
Since this is the central operation on quivers that justifies their distinction from the plain concept of directed graph, we may adopt here the point of view that quiver is synonymous with free category.
So a representation of a quiver is a functor
Concretely, such a thing assigns a vector space to each vertex of the graph , and a linear operator to each edge. Representations of quivers are fascinating things, with connections to ADE theory, quantum groups, string theory, and more.
It may be handy to identify a quiver with its free category. This can be justified in the sense that the functor is an embedding (-surjective for all ) on the cores. In other words, isomorphisms between quivers may be identified with equivalences between free categories with no ambiguity.
However, at the level of noninvertible morphisms, this doesn't work; while is faithful, it is not full. In other words, there are many functors between free categories that are not morphisms of quivers.
Nevertheless, if we fix a quiver and a category , then a representation of in is precisely a functor from to (or equivalently a quiver morphism from to ), and we may well want to think of this as being a morphism (a heteromorphism) from to . As long as is not itself a free category, this is unlikely to cause confusion.
For a quiver, write for the path algebra of over a ground field . That is, is an algebra with -basis given by finite composable sequences of arrows in , including a “lazy path” of length zero at each vertex. The product of two paths composable paths is their composite, and the product of non-composable paths is zero.
A module over is the same thing as a representation of , so the theory of representations of quivers can be viewed within the broader context of representation theory of (associative) algebras.
If is acyclic, then is finite-dimensional as a vector space, so in studying representations of , we are really studying representations of a finite dimensional algebra, for which many interesting tools exist (Auslander-Reiten theory, tilting, etc.).
Gabriel's theorem (Gabriel 72) says that connected quivers with a finite number of indecomposable quiver representations over an algebraically closed fieldare precisely the Dynkin quivers: those whose underlying undirected graph is a Dynkin diagram in the ADE series, and that the indecomposable quiver representations are in bijection with the positive roots in the root system of the Dynkin diagram. (Gabriel 72).
Let be a category (or a (infinity,1)-category). A quiver is a -enriched quiver if it has a collection of objects and a -valued functor for all objects . Quivers in the usual sense are enriched in Set, while loop directed graphs/binary endorelations are quivers enriched in the category of truth values . -quivers are quivers enriched in the category of -quivers.
In dependent type theory with universes, a type equipped with an identity type is a quiver type enriched in a universe Type.
The concept of quiver in the context of quiver representation (and their classification in Gabriel's theorem) originates with
Some general-purpose references include
Harm Derksen, Jerzy Weyman, Quiver representations AMS Notices, 2005.
William Crawley-Boevey, Lectures on quiver representations (pdf).
Alistair Savage, Finite-dimensional algebras and quivers (arXiv:math/0505082), Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, eds. J.-P. Françoise, G.L. Naber and Tsou S.T., Oxford, Elsevier, 2006, volume 2, pp. 313-320.
Quivers (referred to as directed pseudographs) were a tool in parts of the work of Ringel and Youngs in the second half the twentieth century to prove Heawood’s formula for every finite genus, cf. e.g. Fig. 2.3 the monograph
Beware that, strictly speaking, for Ringel, “quiver” means “embedded quiver” (into a given surface); in particular the author distinguishes between the two possible orientations of an embedded loop.
Quivers embedded in surfaces are studied in:
A special kind of quiver (finite, no loops, no parallel arcs) is treated in
Gregory Gutin, Jørgen Bang-Jensen: Digraphs: Theory, Algorithms and Applications. Springer Monographs in Mathematics. Second Edition (2009)
William Lawvere: Qualitative Distinctions Between Some Toposes of Generalized Graphs, Contemporary Mathematics 92 (1989)
Some introductory material on the relation between quivers (there called multigraphs) and categories can be found in
Last revised on March 14, 2023 at 07:32:06. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.