How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
FALSE: every Kan extension is pointwise
Statement refuted
That every left or right Kan extension is pointwise.
The witness below is a left Kan extension along a fully faithful functor which is not pointwise.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The discrete category on two objects ; the category with objects and only the two non-identity arrows and ; the fully faithful inclusion ; the category with objects , identities, and only the two non-identity arrows and ; the functor with and ; and the extension with , , , and the two displayed arrows.
A fully faithful functor is one that is bijective on each hom-set (Faithful, full, fully faithful, essentially surjective, and split essentially surjective functors).
A left Kan extension is initial among pairs with , while pointwise left Kan extensions are computed by the comma-category formula (Left and right Kan extensions, Pointwise Kan extensions by the comma-category formula, The comma-category and representable-preservation notions of pointwise Kan extension agree).
A pointwise left Kan extension along a fully faithful functor would restrict back by isomorphism to the original functor (A pointwise Kan extension along a fully faithful functor genuinely extends the original functor).
An initial object must admit a morphism to every object (Initial object, terminal object, and zero object).
Refutation
The inclusion is fully faithful by [F1], and the pair with and is a left Kan extension of along : if exists, then necessarily and , since has no non-identity arrow out of it and neither does ; and because must carry the arrows and to arrows into and , necessarily , the only object of with arrows to both. Thus and is forced to be the identity on and , so there is exactly one natural transformation .
But is empty: there is no arrow and no arrow in . If were pointwise, [F2] would make the colimit of the empty diagram, hence an initial object of . This is impossible by [F4], since there is no morphism . Therefore is a left Kan extension which is not pointwise.
So the claim that every Kan extension is pointwise is false. The pointwise hypothesis in [F3] is genuinely needed.
Depends on
- Left and right Kan extensions
- Pointwise Kan extensions by the comma-category formula
- The comma-category and representable-preservation notions of pointwise Kan extension agree
- A pointwise Kan extension along a fully faithful functor genuinely extends the original functor
- Faithful, full, fully faithful, essentially surjective, and split essentially surjective functors
- Initial object, terminal object, and zero object
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · two levels
20 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- E. Riehl, Category Theory in Context, 2nd ed., Example 6.2.17 (standard reference, not scraped)