On binary matrix properties

Abstract

The so-called matrix properties of finitely complete categories are a special type of exactness properties that can be encoded as extended matrices of integers. The relation of entailment of matrix properties gives an interesting preorder on the set of such matrices, which can be investigated independently of the category-theoretic considerations. In this paper, we conduct such investigation and obtain several results dealing with binary matrices, i.e., when the only integer entries in the matrix are 0 or 1. Central to these results is a complete description of the preorder in the case of a special type of binary matrices, which we call diagonal matrices, and which include matrices that define Mal’tsev, majority and arithmetical categories.