Closedness properties of internal relations. IV: Expressing additivity of a category via subtractivity (Q2381415)

[For part I--III, see the preceding review.] A variety \(V\) of universal algebras is subtractive in the sense of \textit{A. Ursini} [Algebra Univers. 31, No.~2, 204--222 (1994; Zbl 0799.08010)], if the theory of \(V\) contains a binary term \(s\) (called a subtraction term) and a nullary term \(0,\) satisfying the identities \(s(x,0)=x\) and \(s(x,x)=0.\) The notion of a subtractive category, recently introduced by the author, is a categorical version of the notion of a (pointed) subtractive variety of universal algebras, due to A. Ursini. In this paper the author shows that a subtractive variety \({\mathcal C}\), whose theory contains a unique constant, is abelian (i.e., \({\mathcal C}\) is the variety of modules over a fixed ring), if and only if the dual category \({\mathcal C}^{\text{op}}\) of \({\mathcal C}\) is subtractive. More generally, he shows that \({\mathcal C}\) is additive if and only if both \({\mathcal C}\) and \({\mathcal C}^{\text{op}}\) are subtractive, where \({\mathcal C}\) is an arbitrary finitely complete pointed category, with binary sums, and such that each morphism \(f\) in \({\mathcal C}\) can be presented as a composite \(f=me,\) where \(m\) is a monomorphism and \(e\) is an epimorphism.