Cartesian Coherent Differential Categories

Abstract

We extend to general Cartesian categories the idea of Coherent Differentiation recently introduced by Ehrhard in the setting of categorical models of Linear Logic. The first ingredient is a summability structure which induces a partial left-additive structure on the category. Additional functoriality and naturality assumptions on this summability structure implement a differential calculus which can also be presented in a formalism close to Blute, Cockett and Seely's Cartesian differential categories. We show that a simple term language equipped with a natural notion of differentiation can easily be interpreted in such a category.