Cellular objects and Shelah's singular compactness theorem

DOI10.1016/J.JPAA.2015.10.003MaRDI QIDQ899557zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Jiří Rosický, Tibor Beke

Publication date 30 December 2015

Published in Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3819

zbMATH Keywords

accessible category accessible functor cellular object free structure locally presentable category singular cardinal

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of set theory (03E75) Accessible and locally presentable categories (18C35)

Abstract: The best-known version of Shelah's celebrated singular cardinal compactness theorem states that if the cardinality of an abelian group is singular, and all its subgroups of lesser cardinality are free, then the group itself is free. The proof can be adapted to cover a number of analogous situations in the setting of non-abelian groups, modules, graph colorings, set transversals etc. We give a single, structural statement of singular compactness that covers all examples in the literature that we are aware of. A case of this formulation, singular compactness for cellular structures, is of special interest; it expresses a relative notion of freeness. The proof of our functorial formulation is motivated by a paper of Hodges, based on a talk of Shelah. The cellular formulation is new, and related to recent work in abstract homotopy theory.

Review text

Shelah's Singular Compactness Theorem states that if \(A\) is an abelian group of size \(\mu\), where \(\mu\) is a singular cardinal, such that all subgroups of size less than \(\mu\) are free, then \(A\) itself is free. This theorem has various generalizations which all look informally like the sentence ``if \(\mu\) is a singular cardinal and \(S\) a structure all of whose substructures of cardinality less than \(\mu\) are free, then \(S\) is free itself. The goal of the paper is to make the above sentence precise. Two formulations are proposed: the functorial form and the cellular form. The functorial form starts from a functor \(F:\mathcal{A} \to \mathcal{B}\) preserving filtered colimits from an accessible category to a finitely accessible category: think of \(\mathcal{A}\) as the category of sets, \(\mathcal{B}\) as the category of groups and \(F\) as the free group functor. The functorial form states under a technical condition for \(F\) that if \(X\in \mathcal{B}\) is of size a singular cardinal \(\mu\), if all subobjects of \(X\) of size less than \(\mu\) are in the image of \(F\), then \(X\) itself is in the image of \(F\). The functorial form is actually a little bit more general since it only assumes that ``enough objects of \(X\) lie in the image of \(F\). The cellular form starts from a set of morphisms \(I\) of \(\mathcal{B}\) which is supposed now to be locally finitely presentable (the cocompleteness of \(\mathcal{B}\) is required indeed): think of \(I\) as the singleton \(\{\varnothing \subset \mathbb{Z}\}\). The cellular form states that if \(X\in \mathcal{B}\) is of size a singular cardinal \(\mu\), if all subobjects of \(X\) of size less than \(\mu\) are \(I\)-cellular (i.e. the unique map from the initial object is a transfinite composition of pushouts of maps of \(I\)), then \(X\) itself is \(I\)-cellular.

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