Closing the category of finitely presented functors under images made constructive

Abstract

For an additive category P we provide an explicit construction of a category Q(P) whose objects can be thought of as formally representing im(γ)im(ρ)∩im(γ) for given morphisms γ:A→B and ρ:C→B in P, even though P does not need to admit quotients or images. We show how it is possible to calculate effectively within Q(P), provided that a basic problem related to syzygies can be handled algorithmically. We prove an equivalence of Q(P) with the smallest subcategory of the category of contravariant functors from P to the category of abelian groups Ab which contains all finitely presented functors and is closed under the operation of taking images. Moreover, we characterize the abelian case: Q(P) is abelian if and only if it is equivalent to fp(Pop,Ab), the category of all finitely presented functors, which in turn, by a theorem of Freyd, is abelian if and only if P has weak kernels.The category Q(P) is a categorical abstraction of the data structure for finitely presented R-modules employed by the computer algebra system Macaulay2, where R is a ring. By our generalization to arbitrary additive categories, we show how this data structure can also be used for modeling finitely presented graded modules, finitely presented functors, and some not necessarily finitely presented modules over a non-coherent ring.