Advances in Mathematics 169, 118–175 (2002) doi:10.1006/aima.2001.2056 ACellular Nerve for Higher Categories Clemens Berger Laboratoire J.-A. Dieudonn!e, Universit !e de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Parc Valrose, F-06108 Nice, Cedex 2, France E-mail: cberger@math:unice:fr Communicated by Ross Street Received December 6, 2000; Accepted September 29, 2001 We realise Joyal's cell category Y as a dense subcategory of the category of o- categories. The associated cellular nerve of an o-category extends the well-known simplicial nerve of a small category. Cellular sets (like simplicial sets) carry a closed model structure in Quillen's sense with weak equivalences induced by a geometric realisation functor. More generally, there exists a dense subcategory YA of the category of % A-algebras for each o-operad A in Batanin's sense. Whenever A is contractible, the resulting homotopy category of % A-algebras (i.e. weak o-categories) is equivalent to the homotopy category of compactly generated spaces. _ 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: higher categories; globular operads; combinatorial homotopy. The following text arose from the desire to establish a firm relationship between higher categories and topological spaces. Our approach combines the algebraic features of Batanin's o-operads [2] with the geometric features of Joyal's cellular sets [25] and tries to mimick as far as possible the classical construction of the simplicial nerve of a small category
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- homotopy category
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