In mathematics, a *-autonomous (read "star-autonomous") category C is a symmetric monoidal closed category equipped with a dualizing object
\bot
Let C be a symmetric monoidal closed category. For any object A and
\bot
\partialA,\bot:A\to(A ⇒ \bot) ⇒ \bot
Hom((A ⇒ \bot) ⊗ A,\bot)\congHom(A,(A ⇒ \bot) ⇒ \bot)
evalA,A ⇒ \bot\circ\gammaA ⇒ \bot,A:(A ⇒ \bot) ⊗ A\to\bot
\gamma
\bot
\partialA,\bot
Equivalently, a *-autonomous category is a symmetric monoidal category C together with a functor
(-)*:Cop\toC
A\cong{A**
Hom(A ⊗ B,C*)\congHom(A,(B ⊗ C)*)
\bot=I*
A*=A ⇒ \bot
Compact closed categories are *-autonomous, with the monoidal unit as the dualizing object. Conversely, if the unit of a *-autonomous category is a dualizing object then there is a canonical family of maps
A* ⊗ B*\to(B ⊗ A)*
These are all isomorphisms if and only if the *-autonomous category is compact closed.
A familiar example is the category of finite-dimensional vector spaces over any field k made monoidal with the usual tensor product of vector spaces. The dualizing object is k, the one-dimensional vector space, and dualization corresponds to transposition. Although the category of all vector spaces over k is not *-autonomous, suitable extensions to categories of topological vector spaces can be made *-autonomous.
On the other hand, the category of topological vector spaces contains an extremely wide full subcategory, the category Ste of stereotype spaces, which is a *-autonomous category with the dualizing object
{C}
\circledast
Various models of linear logic form *-autonomous categories, the earliest of which was Jean-Yves Girard's category of coherence spaces.
The category of complete semilattices with morphisms preserving all joins but not necessarily meets is *-autonomous with dualizer the chain of two elements. A degenerate example (all homsets of cardinality at most one) is given by any Boolean algebra (as a partially ordered set) made monoidal using conjunction for the tensor product and taking 0 as the dualizing object.
The formalism of Verdier duality gives further examples of *-autonomous categories. For example, mention that the bounded derived category of constructible l-adic sheaves on an algebraic variety has this property. Further examples include derived categories of constructible sheaves on various kinds of topological spaces. An example of a self-dual category that is not *-autonomous is finite linear orders and continuous functions, which has * but is not autonomous: its dualizing object is the two-element chain but there is no tensor product.
The category of sets and their partial injections is self-dual because the converse of the latter is again a partial injection.
The concept of *-autonomous category was introduced by Michael Barr in 1979 in a monograph with that title. Barr defined the notion for the more general situation of V-categories, categories enriched in a symmetric monoidal or autonomous category V. The definition above specializes Barr's definition to the case V = Set of ordinary categories, those whose homobjects form sets (of morphisms). Barr's monograph includes an appendix by his student Po-Hsiang Chu that develops the details of a construction due to Barr showing the existence of nontrivial *-autonomous V-categories for all symmetric monoidal categories V with pullbacks, whose objects became known a decade later as Chu spaces.
In a biclosed monoidal category C, not necessarily symmetric, it is still possible to define a dualizing object and then define a *-autonomous category as a biclosed monoidal category with a dualizing object. They are equivalent definitions, as in the symmetric case.