Duality for diagram chasing a la Mac Lane in non-abelian categories (Q505346)

In this article, the author builds on previous own work, joint work, and on Maclane's work in category theory. The main contribution of the article is twofold. Firstly, the author develops an axiomatic theory of the ``diagram chasing'' methods, used traditionally in abelian categories, that applies to diagrams of objects and morphisms of non-abelian categories. The author's intention is not to provide an axiomatic theory which would allow to handle all the diagram lemmas of homological algebra. Instead, the goal is to identify those lemmas whose proofs in the abelian category case can be generalized to non-abelian categories using arguments of chasing elements of pointed sets and duality only. Indeed, as shown in the article, there are instances where the techniques do not work. Secondly, the author discusses examples and applications of the results obtained in the first part. In particular, the techniques introduced in this article apply to modular semiexact categories and sequentiable categories (including semi-abelian categories and the categories of group-like structures). The present work also leads to some open questions and conjectures.