The Euler characteristic of an enriched category

Abstract

We define Euler characteristic of a category enriched by a monoidal model category. If a monoidal model category V is equipped with Euler characteristic that is compatible with weak equivalences and fibrations in V, then our Euler characteristic is also compatible with weak equivalences and fibrations in the model structure induced by that of V. In particular, we focus on the case of topological categories; that is, categories enriched by the category of topological spaces. As its application, we obtain the ordinary Euler characteristic of a cellular stratified space X by computing the Euler characteristic of the face category C(X) induced from X.