Insights from Univalent Foundations: A Case Study Using Double Categories

Category theory unifies mathematical concepts, aiding comparisons across structures by incorporating not just objects, but also morphisms capturing interactions between objects. Of particular importance in some applications are double categories, which are categories with two classes of morphisms, axiomatizing two different kinds of interactions between objects. These have found applications in many areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science, for instance, the study of lenses, open systems, and rewriting.

However, double categories come with a wide variety of equivalences, which makes it challenging to transport structure along equivalences. To deal with this challenge, we propose the univalence maxim: each notion of equivalence of categorical structures has a corresponding notion of univalent categorical structure which induces that notion of equivalence. We also prove corresponding univalence principles, which allow us to transport structure and properties along equivalences. In this way, the usually informal practice of reasoning modulo equivalence becomes grounded in an entirely formal logical principle.

We apply this perspective to various double categorical structures, such as (pseudo) double categories and double bicategories. Concretely, we characterize and formalize their definitions in Coq UniMath up to chosen equivalences, which we achieve by establishing their univalence principles.