Many problems lead to the consideration of “algebras”, given by an object A of a category A together with “actions” TkA → A on A of one or more endofunctors of A, subjected to equational axioms. Such problems include those of free monads and free monoids, of cocompleteness in categories of monads and of monoids, of orthogonal subcategories (= generalized sheaf-categories), of categories of continuous functors, and so on; apart from problems involving the algebras for their own sake.
Desirable properties of the category of algebras - existence of free ones, cocompleteness, existence of adjoints to algebraic functors - all follow if this category can be proved reflective in some well-behaved category: for which we choose a certain comma-category T/A
We show that the reflexion exists and is given as the colimit of a simple transfinite sequence, if A is cocomplete and the Tk preserve either colimits or unions of suitably-long chains of subobjects.
The article draws heavily on the work of earlier authors, unifies and simplifies this, and extends it to new problems. Moreover the reflectivity in T/A is stronger than any earlier result, and will be applied in forthcoming articles, in an enriched version, to the study of categories with structure.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.
Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.
To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.
* Views captured on Cambridge Core between <date>. This data will be updated every 24 hours.
Usage data cannot currently be displayed