UNIVERSALPROPERTY

Universal property

In various branches of mathematics, a useful construction is often viewed as the “most efficient solution” to a certain problem. The definition of a universal property uses the language of category theory to make this notion precise and to study it abstractly.

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universal property

Noun

  1. A definition of a mathematical object, up to isomorphism, in terms of abstract maps between it and other objects of the same category. More specifically, it is either the initial property of an initial object in a coslice-like comma category or the terminal property of a terminal object in a slice-like comma category; these are roughly analogous to the minimum and the maximum (respectively) of a certain lattice, and are used to define the object uniquely up to isomorphism.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: universal property
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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