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My nice nats
Collection
context | $F$ in ${\bf D}\longrightarrow{\bf C}$ |
context | $G$ in ${\bf C}\longrightarrow{\bf D}$ |
definiendum | $\langle\alpha,\beta\rangle$ in it |
inclusion | $\alpha:\mathrm{nat}(FG,1_{\bf C})$ |
inclusion | $\beta:\mathrm{nat}(1_{\bf D},GF)$ |
Discussion
That silly name … I made it up.
The natural transformation $\beta:\mathrm{nat}(1_{\bf D},GF)$ squeezes every set $X\in {\bf D}$ into a set $GFX\in {\bf D}$ (although this need not be surjective or injective). The natural transformation $\alpha:\mathrm{nat}(FG,1_{\bf C})$ squeezes all sets $FGX$ in the image of $FG$ back into $X$. The latter operation gets rid of lots $FG$'s without changing the structural properties of ${\bf C}$.
The point is that my equivalence of categories and Counit-unit adjunction are two different important special cases of nice nats. In the former case, the two nats actually shift the whole content of a category internally. In the latter case, the two nats end up defining the shifting operations of a monad.
Theorems
Only when the nats are isomorphisms (as in my equivalence of categories) is $F$ fully faithful and dense.