Cowellpoweredness of some categories of quasi-uniform spaces (Q1633193)

It is known that there is no example of a subcategory of the category $\mathbf{Unif}$ of uniform spaces that is non-cowellpowered. This paper is concerned with cowellpoweredness of subcategories of $\mathbf{QUnif}$, the category of quasi-uniform spaces, and shows that it has is a lot of cowellpowered and non-cowellpowered subcategories. The authors make use of the theory of closure operators in the sense of Dikranjan-Giuli-Tholen which provide a convenient tool for describing epimorphisms. Some of the results are then obtained by a process of lifting subcategories of the category $\mathbf{Top}$ of topological spaces and continuous maps along the forgetful functor $T :\mathbf{QUnif} \to Top$ and studying when epimorphisms and cowellpoweredness are preserved by the lifting. In other cases closure operators of $\mathbf{QUnif}$ are used to provide specific results for $\mathbf{QUnif}$ that have no counterpart in $\mathbf{Top}$. To be noted is the fact that closure operators of the category $\mathbf{Unif}$ were shown to be ``few'' [\textit{M. R. Burke}, Topology Appl. 59, No. 3, 245--259 (1994; Zbl 0847.54002)] and [\textit{D. Dikranjan} and \textit{J. Pelant}, Quaest. Math. 18, No. 4, 381--396 (1995; Zbl 0864.54024)], in the sense that they cannot detect the morphisms of $\mathbf{ Unif}$ (i.e., the uniformly continuous maps). It is shown here that there are many closure operators in $\mathbf{QUnif}$ which coincide, when ``restricted'' to $\mathbf{Unif}$.