October 13
Philipp Rothmaler,
CUNY
A theorem of Makkai implying the existence of strict Mittag-Leffler modules in a definable subcategory
In 1982 Makkai published a very general theorem about the existence of what he later called principally prime (we call them positive atomic) models of so-called regular theories [FULL CONTINUOUS EMBEDDINGS OF TOPOSES, TAMS 269], which seems to have gone largely unnoticed. (Regular he called those theories that are axiomatized by positive primitive (=pp) implications.) This is a strong existence result in some sort of positive logic in a very general categorical (including non-additive) setting. I first discuss its significance for definable subcategories of modules (=model categories of regular theories of modules), which play an important role in representation theory and module theory in general. Part of this is that there these models are precisely the strict Mittag-Leffler modules contained in and relativized to such definable subcategories. Makkai’s original proof is, in its generality, not easy to follow, and so it is of interest, especially to the algebraic community, to find an easier proof for modules. I present a recent one due to Prest. At the time being it works only for countable rings, in the uncountable case one still has to rely on Makkai’s original proof.