One of the subtleties in writing about mathematics is that there are various
forms of mathematical structure where it is convenient to have a standard
example (or family of them) of the structure for the sake of definiteness and to
help represent other things of the same form by relating them to their standard
equivalents. Those standard forms get described as canonical
and there
is a mixture of art and science to chosing which forms to use for them. Those
choices may be to varying degrees subjective and context-dependent, so different
writers may chose different canonical forms for particlar types of mantematical
structure – and, indeed, which forms a writer choses can make a big
difference to how well the rest of the exposition flows. So the choice of which
entities of some given type to take as canonical involves balancing pedagogic,
æsthetic and various other factors – including simple convenience in
the ease with which other instances can be expressed in terms of the canonical
ones.
So here I'll try to illustrate that design choice by going over some of the examples of canonical forms that arise in my writing, explaining why I chose each. This may exhibit some shades of Apologia, but that is not my priority. More important is that, I hope, the reader may gain some insights into how to make corresponding decisions for yourself, possibly better than my choices, at least for your own purposes.
I'll start by enumerating some examples of canonical things, to illustrate what canonical forms are, then devote separate sections to some of them, to go into the details of why I chose the canonicalf orms I do.
There are, of course, various ways we could define these; an n-dimensional
simplex or simply n-simplex has 1 +n corners, in a vector space. The simplex
then comprises all points that can be expressed as weighted averages of the
corners, with non-negative weights. The simplex is degenerate unless the
space's real dimension is at least n, and within it no lower-dimensional
subspace contains vectors parallel to every displacement between pairs of those
1 +n corners; and we won't want our canonical n-simplex to be degenerate, so
we'll need to impose that much on it, at least. From any non-generate n-simplex
there is a linear map (unique up to permutation of the corners) from it to any
n-simplex, so once we have a non-degenerate canonical n-simplex we can express
all others in terms of it. Furthermore, each (1+n)-simplex has
2+n faces
, each of which is an n-simplex opposite
the one of its
vertices that isn't a vertex of that face.
Now one obvious way to proceed is to start with the line segment from 0 to 1 in {reals} as the 1-simplex, embed it in each {lists ({reals}: |n)} n times as (: ({t}| |{i})&unite;({0}: |{j in n: j≠i} ←t; 0≤t≤1 :{reals}) for each i in n and use the co-ordinate planes and the plane that spans the images of t = 1 in those as faces of the simplex. This gives us the quite respectable {lists ({real r: r ≥ 0}: f |n): sum(f) ≤ 1} as the simplex and it's a half-way decent candidate for canonical n-simplex.
However it has certain asymmetries: the zero corner is special, both in being at the origin and in that all edges into it meet at right angles to one another, which won't be true for any of the other vertices. Those edges meeting at it all have unit length, unlike the edges of the face opposite it. Likewise the faces that meet at it all lie in co-ordinate planes and have equal measure (area, generalised), in contrast to the one opposite it which is {lists ({real r: r ≥ 0}: f |n): sum(f) = 1} and has larger measure. This face, on the other hand, is a nicely symmetric (n−1)-simplex, the symmetries being permutation of the co-ordinates of our vectors; those are necessarily isometries in the usual metric on {lists ({real r: r ≥ 0}: |n)}, so preserve angles and lengths. As a result (for n > 1), each (n−2)-simplex face of this face has all those same symmetries, aside from leaving the co-ordinate that's zero on the whole face out of the permutations.
So the n-simplex I actually do use as canonical is {({positives}: f :1+n): sum(f) = 1}. One face of this then actually is {({positives}: f :n): sum(f) = 1}, the canonical (n−1)-simplex, while each of the others is just the image of that under (: f&on;e ←f :) for some monic (1+n: e |n), embedding n in 1+n but omitting a different one of its members than n itself. The whole has symmetry under permutation of co-ordinates, so every edge has the same length, every 2-face has the same area, every 3-face has the same volume and so on. Best of all, if we have some list (V: p |1+n) of points in some vector space V, the simplex with these as vertices can be obtained by mapping each f in our canonical simplex to p.f, the pointwise product of p and f, directly expressing each point of the simplex as a weighted average of its vertices.
At first sight the step down from {real r: r ≥ 0} to {positives} might look like we're omitting the boundary, on which some components are zero, but switching from lists (: |1+n), which have to have an entry for each index from 0 through n, to (: f :1+n), which can omit the indices at which the list had a zero entry, gives us the same effect as if we had a zero at each index we omitted. (Point-wise addition of functions allows for the sum of two functions to map an input that only one of the functions accepts to that one's output. For contrast, point-wise product ignores each input that any of the factors ignores.)
This choice of canonical form also allows us something a little weird that
might not be obviously relevant: it allows the (−1)-simplex to be
well-defined. For n = −1, {({positives}: f :1+n): sum(f) = 1} =
{({positives}: f :0): sum(f) = 1} is empty, since {({positives}: f :0)} = {[]}
and the empty list [] has sum 0, not 1. This allows the point, or 0-simplex
{({positives}: f :1): sum(f) = 1} = {[1]}, to have a boundary consisting of a
single (−1)-simplex, matching the 1+n faces, each an (n−1)-simplex,
that the n-simplex generally has, one opposite each vertex. Note that the
(−1)-simplex, by the same pattern, has a boundary consisting of 0 …
things that we thankfully don't need to decide what they are because there are
none of them; and it makes sense that the empty set has no boundary, as it has
no members for that boundary to be adjscent to. That the boundary of {[1]} is
one empty set may still look a bit weird, but the general pattern has each face
of the boundary opposite a vertex that isn't in the face and there's nothing in
{[1]} other than its single vertex, [1], so the face
opposite that must
be empty.
One objection one might raise to this form of the simplices is that the use of naturals does break the symmetry in one way: the ordering of the naturals implies an ordering of the co-ordinates and hence of the vertices, or of the edges, or of the faces of each higher dimension, within the simplex. This is rendered harmless by the manifest symmetry under perturbations that ignore the order and, in any case, falls under the discussion of why we use the naturals as the canonical sets of each finite cardinality, where there is no need of an ordering within a set for it to have a given cardinality.
Written by Eddy.