Talk "Terminal Coalgebras for Finitary Functors"

by Stefan Milius

Fri, 10 April 2026 at 11:15 am in Torino, Italy

Joint work with: Jiri Adamek and Lawrence S. Moss

Abstract: We present a result that implies that an endofunctor on a category has a terminal coalgebra obtainable as a countable limit of its terminal-coalgebra sequence. It holds for finitary endofunctors preserving nonempty binary intersections on locally finitely presentable categories, assuming that the posets of strong quotients and subobjects of every finitely presentable object satisfy the descending chain condition. This allows one to adapt finiteness arguments that were originally advanced by Worrell concerning terminal coalgebras for finitary set functors. Examples include the categories of sets, posets, vector spaces, graphs, and nominal sets. A similar argument is presented for the category of metric spaces (although it is not locally finitely presentable).