Twisted Cubes and their Applications in Type Theory

TL;DR

This thesis develops the concept of twisted cubes in homotopy type theory, introducing a graph-theoretic framework to modify standard cubes, aiming to support the construction of (infinity, n)-categories and resolve theoretical incompatibilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel graph-based framework for twisted cubes, including the twisted prism functor, and explores their properties and potential applications in type theory.

Findings

Twisted cubes have a unique Hamiltonian path.

Reflexive transitive closure of twisted graphs is isomorphic to simplex graphs.

Framework links twisted cubes to both cubes and simplices.

Abstract

This thesis captures the ongoing development of twisted cubes, which is a modification of cubes (in a topological sense) where its homotopy type theory does not require paths or higher paths to be invertible. My original motivation to develop the twisted cubes was to resolve the incompatibility between cubical type theory and directed type theory. The development of twisted cubes is still in the early stages and the intermediate goal, for now, is to define a twisted cube category and its twisted cubical sets that can be used to construct a potential definition of (infinity, n)-categories. The intermediate goal above leads me to discover a novel framework that uses graph theory to transform convex polytopes, such as simplices and (standard) cubes, into base categories. Intuitively, an n-dimensional polytope is transformed into a directed graph consists 0-faces (extreme points) of the polytope as its nodes and 1-faces of the polytope as its edges. Then, we define the base category as the full subcategory of the graph category induced by the family of these graphs from all n-dimensional cases. With this framework, the modification from cubes to twisted cubes can formally be done by reversing some edges of cube graphs. Equivalently, the twisted n-cube graph is the result of a certain endofunctor being applied n times to the singleton graph; this endofunctor (called twisted prism functor) duplicates the input, reverses all edges in the first copy, and then pairwisely links nodes from the first copy to the second copy. The core feature of a twisted graph is its unique Hamiltonian path, which is useful to prove many properties of twisted cubes. In particular, the reflexive transitive closure of a twisted graph is isomorphic to the simplex graph counterpart, which remarkably suggests that twisted cubes not only relate to (standard) cubes but also simplices.