English

Categories of hypermagmas, hypergroups, and related hyperstructures

Category Theory 2025-05-16 v3 Combinatorics Group Theory Rings and Algebras

Abstract

In order to diagnose the cause of some defects in the category of canonical hypergroups, we investigate several categories of hyperstructures that generalize hypergroups. By allowing hyperoperations with possibly empty products, one obtains categories with desirable features such as completeness and cocompleteness, free functors, regularity, and closed monoidal structures. We show by counterexamples that such constructions cannot be carried out within the category of canonical hypergroups. This suggests that (commutative) unital, reversible hypermagmas -- which we call mosaics -- form a worthwhile generalization of (canonical) hypergroups from the categorical perspective. Notably, mosaics contain pointed simple matroids as a subcategory, and projective geometries as a full subcategory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.09273,
  title  = {Categories of hypermagmas, hypergroups, and related hyperstructures},
  author = {So Nakamura and Manuel L. Reyes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09273},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

54 pages, 3 figures. Corrections made throughout, but especially to Theorem 1.1, Lemma 2.13, and Theorem 4.19. Added Lemma 4.22 and Proposition 4.23. Final version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:10:17.981Z