Victoria Noquez (Indiana University)

The Sierpinski Carpet as a Final Coalgebra

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The background for this work includes Freyd's Theorem, in which the unit interval is viewed as a final coalgebra of a certain endofunctor in the category of bipointed sets. Leinster generalized this to a broad class of self-similar spaces in categories of sets, also characterizing them as topological spaces. Bhattacharya, Moss, Ratnayake, and Rose went in a different direction, working in categories of metric spaces, obtaining the unit interval and the Sierpinski Gasket as a final colagebras in the categories of bipointed and tripointed metric spaces respectively. To achieve this they used a Cauchy completion of an initial algebra to obtain the required final coalgebra. In their examples, the iterations of the fractals can be viewed as gluing together a finite number of scaled copies of some set at some finite set of points (e.g. corners of triangles). Here we will expand these ideas to apply to a broader class of fractals, in which copies of some set are glued along segments (e.g. sides of a square). We use the method of completing an initial algebra to obtain a final coalgebra which is Bilipschitz equivalent to the Sierpinski Carpet, and note that this requires substantially different machinery from previous results in order to handle the metric. Time permitting, we will expand on the Sierpinski Gasket results by considering different categories of metric spaces.

Joint work with Larry Moss.