Crossed modules and Whitehead sequences (Q504543)

The author introduces the notion of a Whitehead sequence associated to a system of two categories, \(\mathbf A\) and \(\mathbf B\), and three functors, \(I,J:A\to B\) and \(G:B\to A\), subject to \(IG=JG=1_{\mathbf B}\), to be a sequence of morphisms in \(\mathbf A\) of the form \(GJA\to A\to GIA\) subject to certain conditions. The purpose of the article is to find conditions under which the category of Whitehead sequences in \(\mathbf A\) is equivalent to the category of internal groupoids in \(\mathbf B\). The article begins with a brief review of the definitions, followed by the examples motivating the present work. The main result is presented in Section 6 and it gives sufficient conditions for the above equivalence to hold. Section 7 discusses the special case when \(\mathbf B\) is pointed and protomodular.