arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Marino Gran.
The category of symmetric quandles is a Mal'tsev variety whose subvariety of abelian symmetric quandles is the category of abelian algebras. We give an algebraic description of the quandle extensions that are central for the adjunction between the variety of quandles and its subvariety of abelian symmetric quandles.
We introduce new notions of weighted centrality and weighted commutators corresponding to each other in the same way as centrality of congruences and commutators do in the Smith commutator theory. Both the Huq commutator of subobjects and Pedicchio's categorical generalization of Smith commutator are special cases of our weighted commutators; in fact we obtain them by taking the smallest and the largest weight respectively. At the end of the paper we briefly consider the universal-algebraic context in connection with an older work of the third author on the ideal theory version of the commutator theory.
In this note some recent developments in the study of homology in semi-abelian categories are briefly presented. In particular the role of protoadditive functors in the study of Hopf formulae for homology is explained.
We study a regular closure operator in the category of quandles. We show that the regular closure operator and the pullback closure operator corresponding to the reflector from the category of quandles to its full subcategory of trivial quandles coincide, we give a simple description of this closure operator, and analyze some of its properties. The category of algebraically connected quandles turns out to be a connectedness in the sense of Arhangel'ski\vı and Wiegandt corresponding to the full subcategory of trivial quandles, while the disconnectedness associated with it is shown to contain all quasi-trivial quandles. The separated objects for the pullback closure operator are precisely the trivial quandles. A simple formula describing the effective closure operator on congruences corresponding to the same reflector is also given.
A semi-localization of a category is a full reflective subcategory with the property that the reflector is semi-left-exact. In this article we first determine an abstract characterization of the categories which are semi-localizations of an exact Mal'tsev category, by specializing a result due to S. Mantovani. We then turn our attention to semi-abelian categories, where a special type of semi-localizations are known to coincide with torsion-free subcategories. A new characterisation of protomodular categories in terms of binary relations is obtained, inspired by the one discovered in the pointed context by Z. Janelidze. This result is useful to obtain an abstract characterization of the torsion-free and of the hereditarily-torsion-free subcategories of semi-abelian categories. Some examples are considered in detail in the categories of groups, crossed modules, commutative rings and topological groups. We finally explain how these results extend similar ones obtained by W. Rump in the abelian context.
The purpose of this article is to prove that the category of cocommutative Hopf $K$-algebras, over a field $K$ of characteristic zero, is a semi-abelian category. Moreover, we show that this category is action representable, and that it contains a torsion theory whose torsion-free and torsion parts are given by the category of groups and by the category of Lie $K$-algebras, respectively.
We study and compare two factorisation systems for surjective homomorphisms in the category of quandles. The first one is induced by the adjunction between quandles and trivial quandles, and a precise description of the two classes of morphisms of this factorisation system is given. In doing this we observe that a special class of congruences in the category of quandles always permute in the sense of the composition of relations, a fact that opens the way to some new universal algebraic investigations in the category of quandles. The second factorisation system is the one discovered by E. Bunch, P. Lofgren, A. Rapp and D. N. Yetter. We conclude with an example showing a difference between these factorisation systems.
A connection between the Galois-theoretic approach to semi-abelian homology and the homological closure operators is established. In particular, a generalised Hopf formula for homology is obtained, allowing the choice of a new kind of functors as coefficients. This makes it possible to calculate the fundamental groups corresponding to many interesting reflections arising, for instance, in the categories of groups, rings, compact groups and simplicial loops.
We extend some properties of pullbacks which are known to hold in a Mal'tsev context to the more general context of Gumm categories. The varieties of universal algebras which are Gumm categories are precisely the congruence modular ones. These properties lead to a simple alternative proof of the known property that central extensions and normal extensions coincide for any Galois structure associated with a Birkhoff subcategory of an exact Goursat category.
We investigate unital, subtractive and strongly unital regular categories with enough projectives and give characterizations of their projective covers. The categorical equation "strongly unital = unital + subtractive" is explored: this leads to proofs of their varietal characterizations in terms of the categorical properties of the corresponding algebraic theories.
We prove that a regular category $\mathcal C$ is a Mal'tsev category if and only if a strong form of the denormalised $3 \times 3$ Lemma holds true in $\mathcal C$. In this version of the $3 \times 3$ Lemma, the vertical exact forks are replaced by pullbacks of regular epimorphisms along arbitrary morphisms. The shape of the diagram it determines suggests to call it the Cuboid Lemma. This new characterisation of regular categories that are Mal'tsev categories (= $2$-permutable) is similar to the one previously obtained for Goursat categories (= $3$-permutable). We also analyse the "relative" version of the Cuboid Lemma and extend our results to that context.
$2$-star-permutable categories were introduced in a joint work with Z. Janelidze and A. Ursini as a common generalisation of regular Mal'tsev categories and of normal subtractive categories. In the present article we first characterise these categories in terms of what we call star-regular pushouts. We then show that the $3 \times 3$ Lemma characterising normal subtractive categories and the Cuboid Lemma characterising regular Mal'tsev categories are special instances of a more general homological lemma for star-exact sequences. We prove that $2$-star-permutability is equivalent to the validity of this lemma for a star-regular category.
Given a torsion theory (Y,X) in an abelian category C, the reflector I from C to the torsion-free subcategory X induces a reflective factorisation system (E, M) on C. It was shown by A. Carboni, G.M. Kelly, G. Janelidze and R. Paré that (E, M) induces a monotone-light factorisation system (E',M*) by simultaneously stabilising E and localising M, whenever the torsion theory is hereditary and any object in C is a quotient of an object in X. We extend this result to arbitrary normal categories, and improve it also in the abelian case, where the heredity assumption on the torsion theory turns out to be redundant. Several new examples of torsion theories where this result applies are then considered in the categories of abelian groups, groups, topological groups, commutative rings, and crossed modules.
In this paper we establish a new characterisation of star-regular categories, using a property of internal reflexive graphs, which is suggested by a recent result due to O. Ngaha Ngaha and the first author. We show that this property is, in a suitable sense, invariant under regular completion of a category in the sense of A. Carboni and E. M. Vitale. Restricting to pointed categories, where star-regularity becomes normality in the sense of the second author, this reveals an unusual behaviour of the exactness property of normality (i.e. the property that regular epimorphisms are normal epimorphisms) compared to other closely related exactness properties studied in categorical algebra.
Protoadditive functors are designed to replace additive functors in a non-abelian setting. Their properties are studied, in particular in relationship with torsion theories, Galois theory, homology and factorisation systems. It is shown how a protoadditive torsion-free reflector induces a chain of derived torsion theories in the categories of higher extensions, similar to the Galois structures of higher central extensions previously considered in semi-abelian homological algebra. Such higher central extensions are also studied, with respect to Birkhoff subcategories whose reflector is protoadditive or, more generally, factors through a protoadditive reflector. In this way we obtain simple descriptions of the non-abelian derived functors of the reflectors via higher Hopf formulae. Various examples are considered in the categories of groups, compact groups, internal groupoids in a semi-abelian category, and other ones.
By defining a closure operator on effective equivalence relations in a regular category $C$, it is possible to establish a bijective correspondence between these closure operators and the regular epireflective subcategories $L$ of $C$. When $C$ is an exact Goursat category this correspondence restricts to a bijection between the Birkhoff closure operators on effective equivalence relations and the Birkhoff subcategories of $C$. In this case it is possible to provide an explicit description of the closure, and to characterise the congruence distributive Goursat categories.
We use Janelidze's Categorical Galois Theory to extend Brown and Ellis's higher Hopf formulae for homology of groups to arbitrary semi-abelian monadic categories. Given such a category A and a chosen Birkhoff subcategory B of A, thus we describe the Barr-Beck derived functors of the reflector of A onto B in terms of centralization of higher extensions. In case A is the category Gp of all groups and B is the category Ab of all abelian groups, this yields a new proof for Brown and Ellis's formulae. We also give explicit formulae in the cases of groups vs. k-nilpotent groups, groups vs. k-solvable groups and precrossed modules vs. crossed modules.
We develop some new aspects of cohomology in the context of semi-abelian categories: we establish a Hochschild-Serre 5-term exact sequence extending the classical one for groups and Lie algebras; we prove that an object is perfect if and only if it admits a universal central extension; we show how the second Barr-Beck cohomology group classifies isomorphism classes of central extensions; we prove a universal coefficient theorem to explain the relationship with homology.