On some generalizations of Hopfian and co-Hopfian Abelian groups. (Q2448950)

Abelian Hopfian and co-Hopfian groups have been studied extensively in the literature, in particular by the authors in the context of algebraic entropy and its dual, adjoint entropy. They have a seemingly simple definition but both classes of groups are extremely difficult to handle. Recall that a group \(G\) is Hopfian if every surjection from \(G\) to \(G\) is an automorphism and dually it is called co-Hopfian if any injection from \(G\) into \(G\) is an automorphism. Finite groups are the easiest examples of such groups. In an earlier paper the two authors introduced and studied two stronger versions of the concepts, the classes of so-called hereditarily Hopfian (co-Hopfian) groups and the super Hopfian (co-Hopfian) groups which are obtained by requiring closure under subgroups, respectively, homomorphic images. The authors obtained complete classifications of those groups in the case when the groups are Abelian. In this paper the authors weaken the notions again by requiring only that countable subgroups or images inherit the Hopfian (co-Hopfian) property. This is a natural notion to study considering the notions of \(\aleph_1\)-freeness in the torsion-free case. Surprisingly, they obtain the same classification, i.e. the weaker notions already define the full classes of hereditarily Hopfian (co-Hopfian) groups and the super Hopfian (co-Hopfian) groups. The paper is nice and elegant and I can recommend it to anyone interested in this subject.