Abstract

The interaction of Hopf monoids and Frobenius monoids is the productive nucleus of the ZX calculus, where famously each Frobenius monoid-comonoid pair corresponds to a complementary basis and the Hopf structure describes the interaction between the bases. The theory of Interacting Hopf monoids (IH), introduced by Bonchi, Sobocinski and Zanasi, features essentially the same Hopf-Frobenius interaction pattern. The free symmetric monoidal category generated by IH is isomorphic to the category of linear relations over the field of rationals: thus the string diagrams of IH are an alternative graphical language for elementary concepts of linear algebra. IH has a modular construction via distibutive laws of props, and has been applied as a compositional language of signal flow graphs. In this talk I will outline the equational theory, its construction and applications, as well as report on ongoing and future work.