A skew approach to enrichment for Gray-categories

Abstract

It is well known that the category of Gray-categories does not admit a monoidal biclosed structure that models weak higher-dimensional transformations. In this paper, the first of a series on the topic, we describe several skew monoidal closed structures on the category of Gray-categories, one of which captures higher lax transformations, and another which models higher pseudo-transformations.

Extended intro. Added material on presentations of tensor products. Journal version