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Recall that a preadditive category is just a category $\mathcal{C}$ enriched in the category of abelian groups such that composition is linear with respect to the various group operations, so $$f\circ(g+h)=f\circ g+f\circ h,$$ $$(g+h)\circ f=g\circ f+h\circ f,$$ and a preadditive category with one object is a categorification of the notion of a noncommutative ring where we interpret the ring addition as the addition inherited from enrichment and multiplication as composition of morphisms.

Is a preadditive groupoid with one object a categorification of the notion of a skew field, and if so where can I read more about it?

Naively it seems like we now have additive inverses and multiplicative inverses for each object; we only seem to be missing multiplicative commutativity to categorify fields. This leads to a followup question,

Is there a notion of a category where composition of endoarrows is always commutative? That is, a category $\mathcal{C}$ such that for all endoarrows $f,g:X\rightrightarrows X$ we have $f\circ g=g\circ f$?

This seems like a bad definition since it involves equality, so perhaps a better request is a category $\mathcal{C}$ such that composition of endoarrows is commutative up to isomorphism in a (co?)slice category, with the above notion recovered as the 'strict' version.

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There aren't any nontrivial preadditive groupoids; a preadditive category always has zero morphisms, and if zero morphisms are invertible then every object is a zero object.

If you think of rings as one-object preadditive categories, then commutative rings can be thought of as one-object preadditive monoidal categories, by the Eckmann-Hilton argument. This is a more natural way to enforce commutativity since it's related to thinking of monoidal categories themselves as one-object $2$-categories and delooping etc.

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    $\begingroup$ Excellent, thank you Qiaochu. $\endgroup$
    – Alec Rhea
    Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 1:53
  • $\begingroup$ I seem to remember a schematic on the nlab that laid out the horizontal categorification process from monoidal to braided to symmetric etc. and laid out their interpretations as degenerate higher categories, but I can't seem to find it now -- any idea what I'm talking about and where it might be? $\endgroup$
    – Alec Rhea
    Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 2:47
  • $\begingroup$ @Alec: maybe this? ncatlab.org/nlab/show/… $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 3:39
  • $\begingroup$ That's it, thank you. $\endgroup$
    – Alec Rhea
    Commented Sep 3, 2022 at 3:53

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