ON QUOTIENTS OF QUANDLES

Abstract

This paper summarizes substantive new results derived by a student team (the first three authors) under the direction of the fourth author at the 2008 session of the KSU REU "Brainstorming and Barnstorming". The main results show that the construction of the inner automorphism group of a quandle gives rise to a functor from the category of quandles and surjective quandle homomorphisms to the category of groups, characterize quotient maps of quandles which do not change the group of inner automorphims, and characterize those normal subgroups of the inner automorphism group which arise as kernels of homomorphisms induced by quandle surjections.