Back Přirozená transformace Czech Natürliche Transformation German Transformación natural Spanish تبدیل طبیعی Persian Transformation naturelle French העתקה טבעית HE Trasformazione naturale Italian 自然変換 Japanese 자연 변환 Korean Natuurlijke transformatie Dutch
In category theory, a branch of mathematics, a natural transformation provides a way of transforming one functor into another while respecting the internal structure (i.e., the composition of morphisms) of the categories involved. Hence, a natural transformation can be considered to be a "morphism of functors". Informally, the notion of a natural transformation states that a particular map between functors can be done consistently over an entire category.
Indeed, this intuition can be formalized to define so-called functor categories. Natural transformations are, after categories and functors, one of the most fundamental notions of category theory and consequently appear in the majority of its applications.