  We redevelop persistent homology (topological persistence) from a categorical
point of view. The main objects of study are diagrams, indexed by the poset of
real numbers, in some target category. The set of such diagrams has an
interleaving distance, which we show generalizes the previously-studied
bottleneck distance. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we greatly
generalize previous stability results for persistence, extended persistence,
and kernel, image and cokernel persistence. We give a natural construction of a
category of interleavings of these diagrams, and show that if the target
category is abelian, so is this category of interleavings.
