arXiv subjects

Zurab Janelidze

Publications and source records attributed to Zurab Janelidze.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Transfer theory for noetherian forms

A noetherian form over a category enables one to formulate and prove homomorphism theorems in that category, such as the isomorphism theorems and the diagram lemmas of homological algebra. In this paper we develop a strategy for establishing existence of a noetherian form over a given category, which enables one to find noetherian forms for a broad range of concrete categories. While it was already known that all semi-abelian categories, Grandis exact categories and algebraic categories have noetherian forms, we now establish that so do wide classes of essentially algebraic and topological categories, which include the categories of small categories, groupoids, topological spaces, extended pseudometric spaces, approach spaces, graphs, measurable spaces and axiom-free relational structures.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

From subtractive ideals of semirings to deductive and inductive sets in general algebras

Kernels of semiring homomorphisms are precisely the subtractive ideals. We extend this decomposition of normality to general algebras by introducing inductive and deductive sets, which turn out to correspond to the two directions of the biconditional in Mal'tsev's criterion for a congruence class. In semirings, inductivity recovers idealhood for subsets containing zero, and deductivity of an ideal recovers subtractivity. Their generation processes, described by polynomials or equivalently by reflexive compatible relations (semicongruences), give two ranks measuring the numbers of steps required uniformly in a variety. We show that apart from the trivial cases, any pair of positive integers or infinity is the inductive-deductive rank pair of some variety. For the variety of semirings, the rank pair is $(1,\infty)$, while for any non-trivial Mal'tsev variety, it is $(1,1)$. For varieties of finite-group actions, inductive rank is expressed exactly in terms of directed Cayley-graph diameters, while deductive rank is related to undirected diameters after symmetrization. We compute both ranks of these action varieties for every finite abelian group in terms of its invariant factors, and obtain their complete spectrum. We also establish special spectrum theorems for subtractive varieties and several classes of ordered algebras. Finally, we characterise structural properties of algebras and varieties by conditions on induction and deduction.

math.RA↗

arXiv2026

Grothendieck Topologies Are Extensional Presentations of the Form of Sieves

A Grothendieck topology on a category determines both a subform of covering sieves and a quotient form obtained by identifying locally equivalent sieves. We place these two constructions in a single short exact sequence. For this purpose we introduce distributivity forms: indexed meet-semilattices equipped with distinguished indexed joins over which finite indexed meets distribute, and a strong version in which these joins also satisfy Beck--Chevalley. Over a fixed base, the resulting categories have all small limits and have kernels and cokernels relative to the closed ideal of fibrewise constant-top morphisms. Their monomorphisms are the fibrewise injective morphisms, and their relative cokernels, together with the top-reflecting morphisms, form an orthogonal factorization system. Cokernels compose but need not be stable under pullback, whereas kernels need not compose. We call a short exact sequence with prescribed middle term an extensional presentation, and prove that Grothendieck topologies on a category are precisely the extensional presentations of its maximally distributive form of sieves. Further applications recover universal productive closure operators and Lawvere--Tierney topologies, functorial non-Archimedean group topologies, and functorial linear topologies on commutative rings.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

Noetherian forms of free non-symmetric operads

In this paper, we study certain categories of labeled finite rooted ordered trees over a fixed set of labels where each label is equipped with an arity: a fixed number of children that the vertex with the given label must have. Equivalently, these are expression trees for operations in a free non-symmetric operad. A morphism between these trees matches a pruning of one tree (a prefix) with an entire subtree of another (a suffix). We characterize such categories, up to isomorphism, in terms of suitable exactness properties. It turns out that these categories exhibit strong algebraic behavior, in the sense that every such category, when appended with a strict initial object, has a particularly nice noetherian form.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

Exactness of the 2-categories of abelian and triangulated categories

We introduce a notion of $2$-homological category modelled on pointed homological categories in the sense of Grandis, using bizero objects whose null $1$-cells are zero objects in the hom-categories for formulating $2$-dimensional pointedness. We first prove directly that the $2$-category of di-exact homological categories, which generalize Puppe exact categories, functors preserving all kernels and cokernels, and arbitrary natural transformations is $2$-homological. Its normal subcategories are saturated thick subcategories, and its exact quotients are constructed by a complete three-arrow fraction calculus similar to the one known for Puppe exact categories. We then adapt this proof to prove that the $2$-category of triangulated categories is also $2$-homological; here, instead of the ternary fractions we use the well-known Verdier fractions. Abstracting the common quotient structure of these proofs yields a general criterion, using which we further establish that the $2$-categories of pointed, additive and abelian categories are also $2$-homological. The criterion also applies to categories enriched in semimodules over a fixed commutative rig, with a zero object, and to their full sub-$2$-category with finite biproducts. Their quotients are linear congruence quotients. Combining enrichment with Puppe exactness gives further examples whose quotients are exact linear localizations, including linear abelian categories as the finite-biproduct case. In the abelian and triangulated cases the normal subcategories and quotients are, respectively, Serre subcategories and Serre quotients, and thick triangulated subcategories and Verdier localizations.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

Partial Linearity in Categories

In this paper we generalise the notion of linearity (in the sense of Lawvere) to a category C equipped with a compatible sum structure and product structure. In this context, any morphism f from an n-fold sum to an n-fold product has a unique n by m matrix presentation, but a morphism for a given matrix does not necessarily exist. We define the sum and product to be compatible if there exists a natural transformation i from sum to product with matrix presentation the identity and define C to be partially linear if such an i is invertible. We establish a coherence theorem for partially linear categories. We generalise the notion of a central morphism to this setting, and show that the central morphisms of a partially linear category admit enrichment over monoids.

math.CT↗

arXiv2026

Comonadic approach to pretorsion theories

We present a comonadic approach to pretorsion theories on semiexact categories, i.e. categories equipped with a closed ideal of null morphisms that admits all kernels and all cokernels. We first prove that bihereditary pretorsion theories are comonadic in a 2-dimensional sense over the 2-category of semiexact categories with naturally chosen 1-cells. We then extend the built pseudo-comonad to guarantee that all pretorsion theories are pseudo-coalgebras. But interestingly, not all pseudo-coalgebras are pretorsion theories. Rather, pseudo-coalgebras give a generalized notion of pretorsion theory.

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

Homological lemmas for (non-abelian) group-like structures by diagram chasing in a self-dual context

Through abelian categories, homological lemmas for modules admit a self-dual treatment, where half of the proof of a lemma is sufficient to prove the full lemma. In this paper, we show how the context of a `noetherian form', recently introduced by the second and third authors, allows a self-dual treatment of these lemmas even in the case of non-abelian categories of group-like structures. This context covers a wide range of examples: module categories, the category of groups, of graded abelian groups, the categories of Lie algebras, of cocommutative Hopf algebras, the category of Heyting semilattices, of loops, the dual of the category of pointed sets, the category of modular/distributive lattices and modular connections, the category of sets and partial bijections, and many others. More generally, it includes all semi-abelian and Grandis exact categories.

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

Fibrational approach to Grandis exactness for 2-categories

In an abelian category, the (bi)fibration of subobjects is isomorphic to the (bi)fibration of quotients. This property captures substantial information about the exactness structure of a category. Indeed, as it was shown by the second author and T.~Weighill, categories equipped with a proper factorization system such that the opfibration of subobjects relative to the factorization system is isomorphic to the fibration of relative quotients are precisely the Grandis exact categories. In this paper we characterize those (1,1)-proper factorization systems on a 2-category in the sense of M.~Dupont and E.~Vitale, for which the weak 2-opfibration of relative 2-subobjects is biequivalent to the weak 2-fibration of relative 2-quotients. This results in a new notion of 2-dimensional exactness, which we then compare with similar notions in the context of categories enriched in pointed groupoids arising in the work of M.~Dupont and H.~Nakaoka.

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

Frobenius reciprocity, modular connections, lattice isomorphism theorem and abstract principal ideals

The purpose of this short note is to fill a gap in the literature: Frobenius reciprocity in the theory of doctrines is closely related to modular connections in projective homological algebra and the notion of a principal element in abstract commutative ideal theory. These concepts are based on particular properties of Galois connections which play an important role also in the abstract study of group-like structures from the perspective of categorical/universal algebra; such role stems from a classical and basic result in group theory: the lattice isomorphism theorem.

math.RA↗

arXiv2025

What is Connectivity?

In this paper, we explore a taxonomy of connectivity for space-like structures. It is inspired by isolating posets of connected pieces of a space and examining its embedding in the ambient space. The taxonomy includes in its scope all standard notions of connectivity in point-set and point-free contexts, such as connectivity in graphs and hypergraphs (as well as k-connectivity in graphs), connectivity and path-connectivity in topology, and connectivity of elements in a frame.

math.GN↗

arXiv2025

Rectangular torsion theories

In this paper we introduce and study \emph{rectangular torsion theories}, i.e.\ those torsion theories $(\C,\T,\F)$ with $\C$ a pointed category, where the canonical functor $\C\to \T\times\F$ is an equivalence of categories. In particular, we show that these are precisely the internal rectangular bands in the 2-category of pointed categories.

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

Abelian objects in categories with normal projections

It is known that in (regular) unital and in subtractive categories, internal abelian groups are simply behaved; e.g., they are the same as internal algebras $(A,s)$ satisfying $s(x,0)=x$ and $s(x,x)=0$, i.e., \emph{subtraction algebras}. Moreover, in these categorical settings, such internal abelian group structures are unique, and every morphism between the underlying objects of internal abelian groups is necessarily a morphism of internal abelian groups. It is also known that both (regular) unital and subtractive categories have normal projections, i.e., the isomorphism formula $(X\times Y)/Y\approx X$ holds. In this paper, we show that all properties of simple behaviour of internal abelian groups in unital and subtractive categories lift to arbitrary categories having normal projections

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

A Primer on Chainmails: Structures for Point-free Connectivity

In point-free topology, one abstracts the poset of open subsets of a topological space, by replacing it with a frame (a complete lattice, where meet distributes over arbitrary join). In this paper we propose a similar abstraction of the posets of connected subsets in various space-like structures. The analogue of a frame is called a chainmail, which is defined as a poset admitting joins of its mails, i.e., subsets having a lower bound. The main result of the paper is an equivalence between a subcategory of the category of complete join-semilattices and the category of chainmails.

math.GM↗

arXiv2025

Toposes have an optimal noetherian form

A noetherian form is an abstract self-dual framework suitable for establishing homomorphism theorems (such as the isomorphism theorems and homological diagram lemmas) for group-like structures. In this paper we identify and carry out an axiomatic analysis of a particular class of noetherian forms which exist for both group-like structures and for sheaves. More abstractly, such noetherian forms can be produced from all semi-abelian categories, Grandis exact categories and toposes.

math.CT↗

arXiv2025

Why is the category of near-vector spaces abelian?

In this paper we present a unified proof of the fact that the category of modules over a ring and the category of near-vector spaces in the sense of J. André, over an appropriate scalar system (a 'scalar group'), are both abelian categories. The unification is possible by viewing each of these categories as subcategories of the (abelian) category of modules over a multiplicative monoid $M$. Although in the case of near-vector spaces all elements of $M$ except one (the 'zero' element) are invertible, we show that this requirement is not necessary for the corresponding category to be abelian in analogy to the well-known fact that modules over a ring form an abelian category even if the ring is not a field (i.e., modules over it are not vector spaces).

math.RA↗

arXiv2024

Isbell's subfactor projections in a noetherian form

In this paper, we revisit the 1979 work of Isbell on subfactors of groups and their projections, which he uses to establish a stronger formulation of the butterfly lemma and its consequence, the refinement theorem for subnormal series of subgroups. We point out an error in the second part of Isbell's refinement theorem, but show that the rest of his results can be extended to the general self-dual context of a noetherian form, which includes in its scope all semi-abelian categories as well as all Grandis exact categories. Furthermore, we show that Isbell's formulations of the butterfly lemma and the refinement theorem amount to canonicity of isomorphisms established in these results.

math.GR↗

arXiv2023

A wide class of examples of pretorsion theories and related remarks

In this paper we construct a wide class of examples of \emph{pretorsion theories} in the sense of A. Facchini, C. Finocchiaro, and M. Gran. Given a category $\mathbb{C}$ with a terminal object $1$ and a category $\mathbb{D}$ with an initial object $0$, we show that $(\mathbb{C}\times \mathbf{0},\mathbf{1}\times\mathbb{D})$ is a pretorsion theory in $\mathbb{C}\times\mathbb{D}$ if and only if each morphism $0\to C$ in $\mathbb{C}$ is a monomorphism, and each morphism $D\to 1$ in $\mathbb{D}$ is an epimorphism. Here $\mathbf{0}$ denotes the set of initial objects in $\mathbb{D}$ and $\mathbf{1}$ denotes the set of terminal objects in $\mathbb{C}$. We then remark that the result generalised to products of arbitrary pretorsion theories.

math.CT↗