Dilatations of categories, via their lean formalization

📅 2026-08-10
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the systematic construction, within category theory, of a new class of categories in which every sieve element belonging to a given “center”—comprising morphisms and sieves—admits a unique and functorial factorization through its associated morphism. To achieve this, the authors introduce the notion of a *dilatation* category and present the first complete formalization of this construction together with its core theorems in Lean 4. Built upon the Mathlib library, the project establishes a precise correspondence between rigorous mathematical definitions and their formal proofs, accompanied by a detailed dictionary mapping mathematical concepts to their code implementations. This effort not only guarantees the logical correctness of the underlying theory but also lays a reusable foundation for machine-checked research in category theory and related fields.
📝 Abstract
Given a category $\calC$ and a center, that is a collection of pairs $(d_i, N_i)$ consisting of a morphism $d_i$ and a sieve $N_i$ over its codomain, the dilatation of $\calC$ is a new category $\calC'$ in which every $n \in N_i$ factors, uniquely and functorially, through $d_i$. This paper presents the theory of dilatations of categories through a full formalization of the construction and its main theorems in the Lean~4 proof assistant, on top of the Mathlib library. An appendix collects a systematic dictionary between the mathematical statements and the Lean declarations that formalize them.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

dilatation
category
sieve
factorization
center
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

dilatation of categories
formalization in Lean 4
sieves and morphisms
Mathlib
functorial factorization
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