// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did the action groupoid say? "I'm acting in groups now.

In mathematics, an action groupoid or a transformation groupoid is a groupoid that expresses a group action. Namely, given a (right) group action

$X\times G\to X,$

we get the groupoid ${\mathcal {G}}$ (= a category whose morphisms are all invertible) where

• objects are elements of $X$,
• morphisms from $x$ to $y$ are the actions of elements $g$ in $G$ such that $y=xg$,
• compositions for $x{\overset {g}{\to }}y$ and $y{\overset {h}{\to }}z$ is $x{\overset {hg}{\to }}z$.

A groupoid is often depicted using two arrows. Here the above can be written as:

$X\times G\,{\overset {s}{\underset {t}{\rightrightarrows }}}\,X$

where $s,t$ denote the source and the target of a morphism in ${\mathcal {G}}$; thus, $s(x,g)=x$ is the projection and $t(x,g)=xg$ is the given group action (here the set of morphisms in ${\mathcal {G}}$ is identified with $X\times G$).

In an ∞-category

Let $C$ be an ∞-category and $G$ a groupoid object in it. Then a group action or an action groupoid on an object X in C is the simplicial diagram

$\cdots \,{\underset {\rightrightarrows }{\rightrightarrows }}\,X\times G\times G\,{\underset {\rightarrow }{\rightrightarrows }}\,X\times G\,\rightrightarrows \,X$

that satisfies the axioms similar to an action groupoid in the usual case.

References

Works cited

• Khan, Adeel A. (2023), Lectures on Algebraic Stacks (PDF)

Further reading

• https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/action+groupoid
• https://mathoverflow.net/questions/130950/groupoids-vs-action-groupoids
• https://www.math.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/~wakate/mcyr/2023/pdf/uchimura_tomoki.pdf in Japanese