Relation categories and coproduct congruence categories in universal algebra (Q1342133)

Universal algebraists and category theorists seem to be taking each others' ideas seriously again, and not only because of the 1993 Berkeley meeting, which marked the uneasy new start of ``official relations'' between these two competing branches of mathematics. Papers such as this should help to strengthen this dialogue. Two important categorical notions, that of a relation in a category with a stable factorization system \(\langle E, M\rangle\), and the categorical duality principle, are exploited here in a universal algebra setting. A detailed account of the first concept (respectively, its dual, here called ``cograph'') occupies nearly the first half of the paper. Although the main sources used by the author are now 25-30 years old and the categorical description of the phenomenon in question has evolved somewhat in the meantime (which may not be easy to see from the outside), this is still a very readable introduction for the non-specialist. The applications to universal algebra take up the second half of the paper. While categories of relations always exist for a variety \(\mathcal V\), categories of cographs depend on the amalgamation property (AP) and on the congruence extension property (CEP). In fact, the hom-sets in these categories carry a natural order, hence we are dealing with 2-categories. Quite a number of notions studied in universal algebra turn out to be connected with properties of these two 2-categories. In order to reap the categorical benefits, some flexibility concerning the empty algebra is required. The author carefully presents an argument that shows the practice of simply disallowing the empty algebra is unjusti.