Sets
It is the most important category, the inspiration for the others, maybe.
- Objects: the collection of all sets
- Morphisms: maps between sets
- Composition is, of course, the composition of maps.
It has the structure of a lattice.
Here’s a version of your note with those additions integrated:
Membership as a morphism
In Set, the usual notion of membership can be expressed categorically:
- An element
is the same thing as a morphism
where
This way, an element is identified with a function from the “one-point set” into
Generalized elements in other categories
The notion extends beyond Set:
- In any category
with a terminal object , a morphism
plays the role of an element of
- This provides a generalized notion of belongingness or membership, even if objects of
are not sets in the usual sense.
Thus, in Set, the terminal object is the singleton set, and we recover the familiar definition of an element. In other categories, these morphisms encode “points” or “states” of objects. This is related to Yoneda’s lemma, which is where generalized elements become formalized as morphisms from arbitrary objects, not just the terminal one.
For an interesting example see random variable#Category theory viewpoint.