We continue the program of structural differential geometry that begins with the notion of a tangent category, an axiomatization of structural aspects of the tangent functor on the category of smooth manifolds. In classical geometry, having an affine structure on a manifold is equivalent to having a flat torsion-free connection on its tangent bundle. This equivalence allows us to define a category of affine objects associated to a tangent category and we show that the resulting category is also a tangent category, as are several related categories. As a consequence of some of these ideas we also give two new characterizations of flat torsion-free connections. We also consider 2-categorical structure associated to the category of tangent categories and demonstrate that assignment of the tangent category of affine objects to a tangent category induces a 2-comonad.
Keywords: Tangent categories, affine manifolds, connections
2010 MSC: 18D99, 53A15, 53B05, 53C05, 18F15
Theory and Applications of Categories, Vol. 34, 2019, No. 15, pp 405-437.
Published 2019-04-29.
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