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I keep seeing them crop up in higher category theory, and I only barely understand their definition - I don’t really have a good conceptual or “intuitive” reason for why they’re good
To oversimplify dramatically, model categories are a computational tool. When working with oo-categories, there's many concepts that are only defined "up to a sequence of higher homotopies". This makes it almost impossible to do concrete computations (eg. limits/colimits, but already computing the space Hom(X,Y) can be difficult), since it's cumbersome to have to handle this sequence of higher homotopies by hand
oooh that sounds pretty good - i'm a physicist, i love computational tools!
i have heard that they "present" an infinity category in some appropriate sense
is this in a similar way to how you can "present" a group by generators and relations?
A model category is a 1-category which gives a particular model for this oo-category, in the sense that it's a particular (non-canonical) presentation, and in which computations are easier. This is essentially because they handle the sequence of higher homotopies for you, and turn your computation into something 1-categorical
oh, that's awesome!
Yeah, they're SUPER useful!
:D
how do they manage to package everything into 1-categorical concepts?
presumably not every -category admits a model category presentation?
as in you can turn a model category into an -category but not the other way around
So, for example, say you want to do a computation with the oo-category of spaces. You can "model" spaces as simplicial sets, or by topological spaces. You get two different model categories (with an adjunction between them, telling you how to translate back and forth between the models), and you can compute in either one, depending on which is easier.
ah hm ok ok
so i have heard of, say, quasicategories, as a particular subcategory of simplicial sets
simplicial sets on their own are just a presheaf category, so a 1-category, right?
objects are simplicial sets, morphisms are natural transformations between these
if you wanted to make this into an category you'd need modifications and higher transfors
but, you're saying that you don't actually need to do this? in fact, you can get away just with morphisms of simplicial sets?
Simplicial sets are extremely flexible, and by choosing different model structures they can model different things. For instance, with one model structure simplicial sets model spaces. With another model structure, simplicial sets model quasi-categories (read: oo-categories). Concretely what this means is that you can reduce many oo-categorical questions about spaces or oo-categories to 1-categorical questions about simplicial sets, by using the appropriate model structure. But now you're doing combinatorics, so you have a chance at actually doing the computation!
awesome!!!
so a model structure on a 1-category is, roughly, a way of "automatically generating all higher cells"?
but in a way that can be described purely in 1-categorical terms
and different model structures correspond to different choices of higher cells
Kind of! It's maybe better to think of it as a way to cleverly choose a representative object without many higher cells, so that the oo-computation ends up just being a 1-computation after all
hm, how do you mean?
All the homotopy theory/higher cells/etc is stored in the weak equivalences. The way you often get oo-categories is by taking a 1-category and freely inverting some set of arrows that morally should be isomorphisms. The classic examples are topological spaces (where we want to invert the homotopy equivalences) and chain complexes (where we want to invert the quasi-isomorphisms)
hm i have roughly heard this before but didn't quite understand it
if you freely invert a set of arrows, where you do get the higher cells from?
like e.g. what would a 2-cell be in this context
Now, of course, when you invert the weak equivalences, things that used to not be isomorphic become isomorphic (that's the whole point). So when you do a computation in the localized category (really an oo-category) any one of these objects is as good as any other. The model structure tells you how to choose a good object, on which the obvious 1-categorical computation will actually agree with the more subtle oo-categorical computation
ohhhhh
so like, for
for distinct are not homeomorphic spaces
but if you say that homotopy equivalences really should be isomorphisms, then they are
exactly!
and so a model category might say "hey, it might be useful to use for this problem, and for this one, and for this one"
Chris Grossack (she/they) said:
exactly!
:D
so i guess - just having the weak equivalences isn't enough to tell you what objects are "good"
is that where the fibrations and cofibrations come in?
Also, a few years ago when I was first learning this, I wrote up some blog posts about model categories and whatnot. I haven't reread them recently, but I don't think anything I said was too off-base, so you might find them helpful: https://grossack.site/tags/homotopy-theories/
i'll check them out, thank you so much!! you've already been really helpful :)
Iirc in pt 3 I give an example (that I think I learned from one of Carlos Simpson's lectures?) of how inverting arrows can create higher homotopies, which you might find instructive
thanks for the heads-up :>
it's interesting because when i think "homotopy" i think "continuous path between two things"
Ruby Khondaker (she/her) said:
and so a model category might say "hey, it might be useful to use for this problem, and for this one, and for this one"
Yeah, but a more accurate example would be "instead of using a module, you should use its projective resolution" or, "instead of using a crummy topological space, you should use a weakly equivalent CW complex"
but apparently "homotopy" really means "these things should be isomorphic even though they're not"?
Ruby Khondaker (she/her) said:
it's interesting because when i think "homotopy" i think "continuous path between two things"
i guess this is really saying something about "these two morphisms should be the same, even though they're not"
so i guess homotopy naturally lives at the level of 1-cells in my head, not 0-cells
Homotopies can live in all dimensions (I guess maybe ). So if you have two arrows you can have a homotopy . But maybe there's a second homotopy that also works. You can ask for a higher homotopy . But you might have two of these, and ask for a higher higher homotopy between those, and so on.
yes yes of course, but what i'm going off is this statement in your blog post:
oh no, hopefully something I said 3 years ago isn't going to come back to bite me, haha. Let's see
to me this sounds like you're saying "these two 0-cells should be equivalent, even though they might not be at the moment"
but for me, homotopy only makes sense for 1-cells and higher?
Ah, sure. Yeah that is what I'm saying.
i think that's where my confusion lies at the moment
i understand homotopy in the "these two 1-cells should really be identified" (or higher), but not really "this particular 1-cell should really be an iso"
Ah, good. This is a perfect time to introduce part of the model category structure, then, since I think it will explain the confusion
so i guess i need to figure out why these notions are the same idea
oh!
Say you have a map of topological spaces. Then we say is a weak homotopy equivalence if it induces isomorphisms on all homotopy groups. If we're doing homotopy theory, it makes sense that we might want to consider such an "as good as an isomorphism".
right right
so if you "probe" by maps out of the -spheres
then they can't distinguish ?
so long as you identify homotopic maps out of the -spheres
or sorry, they can't distinguish between and
But there's another (stronger) thing you can ask for, which is just a homotopy equivalence. This is a pair of maps and so that and are homotopic to their respective identity maps. It's a sad fact of life (reflected in the names) that not every weak homotopy equivalence is half of a homotopy equivalence
What you would LIKE to say is that in the homotopy category should just be -- the set of arrows in the category we started with, quotiented out by homotopy equivalence. If you did this, then all of our homotopy equivalences would become isomorphisms, and things would be nice and easy to compute with (since we can just work with the arrows in the category we started with, remembering that they're actually equivalence classes now)
Yeah, that’s what I’d expect!
And I guess it makes more intuitive sense - now the homotopies only compare 1-cells
But I’m assuming there’s a catch
Unfortunately, this doesn't work! Basically because weak homotopy equivalences don't need to have homotopy inverses. Indeed, if we invert a homotopy equivalence we already have a good candidate -- its quasi-inverse . This means we can see it at the level of our old homsets. But if is merely a weak homotopy equivalence, then we really have to add a genuinely new arrow, and this makes our homsets bigger in the homotopy category, not smaller!
Indeed you can come up with 1-categories and weak equivalences so that starts out as a set, but after passing to the homotopy category it becomes a proper class!
Ah ok so
If I take homotopy for now to mean “some way of identifying 1-cells”
Then you can have “strong” homotopy equivalences, which are arrows with a homotopy inverse
This seems like a tricky situation, but thankfully Whitehead's Theorem comes to save the day:
Every weak homotopy equivalence between CW complexes is a homotopy equivalence!
But often it’s the case that you want more than these - “weak homotopy equivalences”
Which don’t have a homotopy inverse at the level of spaces, but do at the level of homotopy groups, which is really what you care about
Inverting these then has to add arrows, so you get a bigger homset
Is that about right…?
So this tells you that as long as X and Y are CW complexes, it will be the case that , which is much easier to compute with!
Then one thing the model structure buys you is a good way to take a general space and replace it by a weakly homotopy equivalent CW-complex . Then we can essentially define to be
oh you don't need to replace ?
It depends on your exact model structure. In general you need to be "cofibrant" and to be "fibrant" to make things work out nicely. It turns out that in the classical model structure on topological spaces every object is fibrant, so it suffices to just cofibrantly replace . But in general you might need to replace one or the other or both.
ohhh ok i've heard of this!
so hm, lemme check if this is accurate
suppose and are objects of your model category
and you want to compute in the localised category
unfortunately just taking equivalence classes doesn't work :(
but! if you replace with a cofibrant object , and with a fibrant object
(that they're weakly equivalent to)
then
Exactly! And, moreover, this is of the space of maps in the -category version of the localization. So you can already see how the model structure is helping us get our hands on the -category, even in this easy example.
oh, wonderful!
so i'm assuming you can additionally recover 2-cells from and ?
and then if you want to compose maps, you want the "middle" object to be bifibrant
so that you can map into and out of it nicely
yup! The trick to getting the 2-cells is to just not quotient out by homotopy. You remember the homotopies as higher data
mhm mhm - i'm familiar with how this is done in the -categorical case, but not yet in the model category case
oh, i just got to the hammock construction!
In the nicest cases, your model category is
(1) enriched in simplicial sets (so that is always a simplicial set
and
(2) is a kan-complex (read: bifibrant as a simplicial set) whenever and $$Y$ are bifibrant (or more generally whenever is cofibrant and $$Y$ is fibrant)
But in general you do this hammock construction that you found, haha.
hm so this is simplicial localization
is there a version for cubical localization?
(iirc the hammock construction is actually regarded as not the best approach. You probably want "bousfield localization", but I didn't know anything about that when I was writing these posts)
oh, i've heard of that! i think mike shulman mentioned it in another channel
What do you mean by "cubical" localizations? Do you want to model your mapping spaces by cubes instead of simplicies?
yeah!
i just prefer cubical sets for a few things
Yeah, totally. There's a model structure on cubical sets which presents the -category of spaces. So you could probably just as well work with a 1-category enriched in cubical sets with the property that is bifibrant (as a cubical set) whenever is cofibrant and is fibrant
:D
I haven't thought much about these things, but especially with cubical agda I know a lot of people have thought a lot about it
the reason why cubical sets are nice is cause they allow for tensor products more easily
oh is that cubical type theory stuff?
i think one of my friends is into that
Also I think Cubical models of categories is nice for this :)
Cool! Yeah, iirc there were some problems relating the precise semantics of cubical agda to the usual -category of spaces? But I'm not sure what the state of the art is on that
For reference I'm just trying to understand the category of weak categories
Anyways, I have to go to bed, but hopefully this was helpful! Feel free to ask more, and other people (more expert than me) can probably answer questions too
thanks so so much!!
ofc! ^_^
Hm so are model categories only helpful for categories?
ooh actually maybe the tensor product might help here
what i mean specifically is - i've seen papers talking about the model structure on complicial sets or comical sets
but, does this present the full category of such objects? or only the truncated category?
Also if I’ve understood you correctly - model category structures are useful precisely when your objects aren’t all already bifibrant, right?
Model categories only model -categories, not -categories for higher .
One less-obvious reason model categories are useful is that when you have a model category where not all objects are fibrant, or not all objects are cofibrant, and you only care about maps into/out of an object, you can use an object that's only fibrant/cofibrant but is much simpler than its cofibrant/fibrant replacement.
I wrote in the other thread:
Mike Shulman said:
Ruby Khondaker (she/her) said:
is there a way to get the -category of such -categories from this though
Not as easy a one. If a model category is suitably enriched over some other model category which presents some -category , then its presented -category will be enriched over . So if you can pick an appropriate such that an -enriched -category can be viewed as an -category, you can use a -enriched model category to present an -category.
Ruby Khondaker (she/her) said:
Also if I’ve understood you correctly - model category structures are useful precisely when your objects aren’t all already bifibrant, right?
They're certainly more useful in that case, but I wouldn't say they're useless even when all objects are bifibrant, such as for the canonical model structure on Cat. For instance, in good cases model structures on a category can be lifted to functor categories , or to the category of algebras for some monad on , and in general these induced model structures will no longer have all objects bifibrant even if that was the case in , so the original model structure on was useful as a way to get to these other ones.
Oh ok, I see! So even if a “whitehead” theorem holds where your weak equivalences are the same as strong equivalences, it can still be good to single out a class of cofibrations and a class of fibrations
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Chris Grossack (she/they) said:
When working with oo-categories, there's many concepts that are only defined "up to a sequence of higher homotopies". This makes it almost impossible to do concrete computations (eg. limits/colimits, but already computing the space Hom(X,Y) can be difficult), since it's cumbersome to have to handle this sequence of higher homotopies by hand
The thread progressed too much for me to read everything, but a few days ago I wanted to say: this is an ex-post reading of the definition that cannot possibly have been what Quillen had in mind. So, what do you mean by this?