An Oriented Street--Roberts Conjecture

Abstract

We formulate a notion of oriented polytope, including Street's oriented simplices and Gray's oriented cubes, and use this to prove an oriented version of the Street--Roberts conjecture, presenting $(\infty,\infty)$-categories as sheaves on suitable families of oriented polytopes, generalizing work of Campion. This allows us to understand $(\infty, \infty)$-categories from a geometric perspective, as directed analogues of homotopy types. These familes of oriented polytopes induce basic operations in higher category theory: for instance, the join, Gray tensor, and bicone arise from the geometry of the orientals, cubes, and orthoplexes, respectively. We study the interaction of these operations and derive some geometric formulae, generalizing work of Ara--Maltsiniotis, Verity, and others.