Terminal objects are unique up to unique isomorphism
Statement
If and are both terminal objects of (there is exactly one morphism from every object into each of them), then : there is an isomorphism between them, and it is the only morphism . The dual statement holds for initial objects, and hence for products by the same argument applied to the category of candidate cones.
Why is it true?
Without this fact, "the" terminal object or "the" product would not be well-defined — different constructions of a product (say, ordered pairs vs. some other encoding) need to be interchangeable, and uniqueness up to unique isomorphism is exactly the precise sense in which they are "the same".
Proof sketch
Since is terminal, every object — in particular — has exactly one morphism into it; call it . Since is terminal, symmetrically there is exactly one .
Consider the composite . Because is terminal, there is exactly one morphism , and is one such morphism; since is also a morphism , uniqueness forces .
By the symmetric argument using the terminality of , the composite must equal : .
A morphism with a two-sided inverse is by definition an isomorphism, so is an isomorphism with inverse . It is the unique morphism because terminality of already says there is only one such morphism at all — was forced from the start, and it simply turned out to be invertible.
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
- David I. Spivak (2012). Functorial Data Migration · arXiv:1009.1166