The defect functor of a homomorphism and direct unions (Q269853)

Commuting properties of some canonical functors (Hom-covariant functor, \(\mathrm{Ext}^1\)-covariant functor, etc.) with respect to direct limits (direct unions or direct sums) is important from various reasons. For example, we can apply them to characterise finitely presented objects and finitely generated objects in some additive categories, and also these properties appear in the theory of coherent functors. In this article the authors characterise commuting properties with respect to direct limits (in Section 3), direct unions (in Section 4) and direct sums (in Section 5) of the defect functor \(\mathrm{Def}_\beta(-)\) associated to a homomorphism \(\beta:L\rightarrow P\) in a a locally finitely presented abelian category. Recall that \(\beta\) induces a natural transformation \(\mathrm{Hom}(\beta,-):\mathrm{Hom}(P,-)\rightarrow \mathrm{Hom}(L,-)\) and then \(\mathrm{Def}_{\beta}(-):=\mathrm{Coker}(\mathrm{Hom}(\beta,-))\); this is Definition 1. Section 6 is dedicated for studying the commuting properties of the covariant functor \(\mathrm{Ext}_{\mathcal C}^1(M,-)\), where \(\mathcal C\) is an abelian category with a projective strong generator which is a direct sum of finitely presented objects. One of the main results of this article is Theorem 44, proved in Section 6, where for an object \(M\) in the above category \(\mathcal C\) it is shown that \(\mathrm{Ext}^1_{\mathcal C}(M,-)\) commutes with direct sums if and only if \(M\) is \(2\)-almost projective; that is, \(M\) is a direct summand of a direct sum between a projective object and a finitely presented object. Among other important results we mention Theorem 34 and its corollaries, Corollary 35 and 36, where ideas from set theory are used.