In 1988, Sibe Mardešić and Andrei Prasolov isolated an inverse system $\textbf {A}$ with the property that the additivity of strong homology on any class of spaces which includes the closed subsets of Euclidean space would entail that $\lim ^n\textbf {A}$ (the nth derived limit of $\textbf {A}$) vanishes for every $n>0$. Since that time, the question of whether it is consistent with the $\mathsf {ZFC}$ axioms that $\lim ^n \textbf {A}=0$ for every $n>0$ has remained open. It remains possible as well that this condition in fact implies that strong homology is additive on the category of metric spaces.

We show that assuming the existence of a weakly compact cardinal, it is indeed consistent with the $\mathsf {ZFC}$ axioms that $\lim ^n \textbf {A}=0$ for all $n>0$. We show this via a finite-support iteration of Hechler forcings which is of weakly compact length. More precisely, we show that in any forcing extension by this iteration, a condition equivalent to $\lim ^n\textbf {A}=0$ will hold for each $n>0$. This condition is of interest in its own right; namely, it is the triviality of every coherent n-dimensional family of certain specified sorts of partial functions $\mathbb {N}^2\to \mathbb {Z}$ which are indexed in turn by n-tuples of functions $f:\mathbb {N}\to \mathbb {N}$. The triviality and coherence in question here generalise the classical and well-studied case of $n=1$.

In this paper a generalization of the interpretation of Robinson of torsion products as homotopy groups is given. This generalization allows us to define right derived functors of a coproduct preserving functor defined on a small category with all finite colimits to the category of abelian groups. We show that when the category is additive the definition coincides with the definitions of the right derived functors of Cartan and Eilenberg.

Let R be an associative ring which is not necessarily commutative. For any torsion theory τ on the category of left R-modules and for any nonnegative integer n we define and study the notion of the nth local cohomology functor with respect to τ. For suitably nice rings a bound for the nonvanishing of these functors is given in terms of the τ-dimension of the modules.

The object of this paper is to generalize to infinite CW complexes the known pull-back theorems or fracture lemmas concerning maps from finite CW complexes to localizations and completions.