The Yoneda embedding is fully faithful
Statement
The Yoneda embedding , , is fully faithful: for every , , and this bijection sends a morphism to the natural transformation given by postcomposition with .
Why is it true?
Full faithfulness is exactly the guarantee that the translation loses no information whatsoever: distinct morphisms of become distinct natural transformations, and every natural transformation between two representable presheaves comes from an actual morphism of , which is what justifies studying objects purely through the maps into them.
Proof sketch
Apply the Yoneda lemma with the target functor set to . The lemma gives a bijection , and unwinding the definition gives exactly .
It remains to identify what morphism of a natural transformation corresponds to under this bijection, and to check it is postcomposition. By the formula for , corresponds to the element ; call this morphism .
Now use (the theorem above, applied with ) to recover every component of from : for any object and any , . Unwinding the contravariant action of on morphisms — precomposition — gives . So : every component of is literally postcomposition with .
Because and are mutually inverse bijections (proved above) and postcomposition with is exactly , the assignment sending to postcomposition with is itself a bijection — which is precisely the statement that is fully faithful.
Topics that use this theorem
Step-by-step proofs
No step-by-step proof yet for this theorem.
References
- Saunders Mac Lane (1998). Categories for the Working Mathematician
- Emily Riehl (2016). Category Theory in Context
- Jacob Lurie (2009). Higher Topos Theory · arXiv:math/0608040