foundations of mathematics Topos theory

The original purpose of category theory had been to make precise certain technical notions of algebra and topology and to present crucial results of divergent mathematical fields in an elegant and uniform way, but it soon became clear that categories had an important role to play in the foundations of mathematics. This observation was largely the contribution of the American mathematician F.W. Lawvere (b. 1937), who elaborated on the seminal work of the German-born French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck (b. 1928) in algebraic geometry. At one time he considered using the category of (small) categories (and functors) itself for the foundations of mathematics. Though he did not abandon this idea, later he proposed a generalization of the category of sets (and mappings) instead.

Among the properties of the category of sets, Lawvere singled out certain crucial ones, only two of which are mentioned here:

1. There is a one-to-one correspondence between subsets B of A and their characteristic functions χ ∶ A → {true, false}, where, for each element a of A, χ(a) = true if and only if a is in B.
2. Given an element a of A and a function h ∶ A → A, there is a unique function f ∶ null → A such that f(n) = hⁿ(a).

Suitably axiomatized, a category with these properties is called an (elementary) topos. However, in general, the two-element set {true, false} must be replaced by an object Ω with more than two truth-values, though a distinguished arrow into Ω is still labeled as true.