Radicals in Categories

Abstract

The study of radicals in general categories has followed several lines of development. The problem of defining radical properties in general categories has been considered by Kurosh and Shul'geifer, see (7). Under mild conditions on their categories they obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of radical functors which are closely related to radical properties. Another approach is by Maranda (5) and Dickson (3) who studied idempotent radical functors and torsion theories in abelian categories. Our aim has been to study radical functors in as general a category as possible. To this end we introduce the concept of an R-category. The categories of rings, modules, near-rings, groups and Jordan algebras are all examples of R-categories.