Groupoids and skeletal categories form a pretorsion theory in Cat

Epimorphisms, monomorphisms, special classes of morphisms, null morphisms (18A20) Limits and colimits (products, sums, directed limits, pushouts, fiber products, equalizers, kernels, ends and coends, etc.) (18A30) Groupoids, semigroupoids, semigroups, groups (viewed as categories) (18B40) Torsion theories, radicals (18E40)

Abstract: We describe a pretorsion theory in the category

C a t

of small categories: the torsion objects are the groupoids, while the torsion-free objects are the skeletal categories, i.e., those categories in which every isomorphism is an automorphism. We infer these results from two unexpected properties of coequalizers in

C a t

that identify pairs of objects: they are faithful and reflect isomorphisms.

Review text

The authors' abstract begins with: ``We describe a pretorsion theory in the category \(\mathsf{Cat}\) of small categories: the torsion objects are the groupoids, while the torsion-free objects are the skeletal categories, i.e., those categories in which every isomorphism is an automorphism. It also has one more sentence indicating that this construction is not as simple as it might seem to be; it is in fact expanded in the Introduction as follows: ``The results in the present paper rely heavily on a careful study of some particular coequalizers in \(\mathsf{Cat}\): the coequalizers of pairs of functors defined on a discrete category. Such coequalizers have properties that are atypical for a quotient functor, the most striking ones being their faithfulness and the reflection of isomorphisms. Establishing these properties is quite cumbersome and reduces to so-called ``word problems on formal chains of arrows in the quotient graph used to construct the coequalizer. The work of \textit{J. R. Isbell} on Dominions [Am. J. Math. 90, 1025--1030 (1968; Zbl 0194.01602)] and the Diplomarbeit of \textit{R. Börger} [Kongruenzrelationen auf Kategorien. Münster (Master's thesis) (1977)] provided us with the necessary tools for handling these problems. Note that by a ``pretorsion theory the authors mean a non-pointed version of a torsion theory, as in [\textit{A. Facchini} and \textit{C. A. Finocchiaro}, Ann. Mat. Pura Appl. (4) 199, No. 3, 1073--1089 (2020; Zbl 1481.18002); \textit{A. Facchini} et al., J. Pure Appl. Algebra 225, No. 2, Article ID 106503, 20 p. (2021; Zbl 1457.18009)].

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