Weak distributive laws

Abstract

Distributive laws between monads (triples) were defined by Jon Beck in the 1960s; see [1]. They were generalized to monads in 2-categories and noticed to be monads in a 2-category of monads; see [2]. Mixed distributive laws are comonads in the 2-category of monads [3]; if the comonad has a right adjoint monad, the mate of a mixed distributive law is an ordinary distributive law. Particular cases are the entwining operators between algebras and coalgebras; for example, see [4]. Motivated by work on weak entwining operators (see [5] and [6]), we define and study a weak notion of distributive law for monads. In particular, each weak distributive law determines a wreath product monad (in the terminology of [7]); this gives an advantage over the mixed case. © Ross Street, 2009. Permission to copy for private use granted.