The ideas of injections and surjections in the context of sets and
functions is paralleled in the context of categories by the concepts of
monomorphisms and epimorphisms.
Monomorphism
Let be a category and and be objects of
. A morphism is said to be a
monomophism iff:
For all objects of and all morphisms
An epimorphism is defined similarly, but with the composition order reversed.
Epimorphism
Let be a category and and be objects of
. A morphism is said to be a
monomophism iff:
For all objects of and all morphisms
Essense
If is a monomorphism and is composed with some unknown morphism , then knowing
and is enough to information to recover exactly.
In other words, there is no redundancy prodived by that allows two
morphisms and to compose with such that
and produce the same morphism.
Yet another wording: no morphism can 'hide' behind .
Similarly, an epimorphism does not afford any ambiguity to morphisms
that compose after .
(monomorphic ephimorphic isomorphic)
Functions between sets are injective iff they are monomorphisms, and they
are surjective iff they are epimorphisms. Consequently, a function is isomorphic iff it is monomorphic and epimorphic.
This bi-implication relationship, (monomorphic ∧ epimorphic ⇔ isomorphic),
is true for the category , but it is not true for categories
in general. For example, the category formed by the relation ≤ on the inteters: all morphisms are both monomorphisms and epimorphisms, but only a
subset of morphisms, the identies, are isomorphisms.
Injective relationship between morphisms
The following diagram tries to hint at the idea that a monomorphism induces an injective map forming composition morphisms when is the second morphism. An analagous situation describes an epimorphism inducing an injection when the epimorphism is applied first in a composition.
Example
. Monomorphic without a left-inverse.
There is a single non-trivial monomorphism from the cyclic group to the symmetry group , and its set function is injective. However, one cannot go the other way.
In category , a function is monomorphic iff injective iff it has a left-inverse. In other categories; however, stricter requirements on what constitutes a homomorphism may either prevent there being a left inverse, or may weed out other candidate mappings allowing a non-injective map to be monomorphic. In the current example, a monomorphism with an injective set function no inverse, as the possible inverting set functions don't qualify as a group homomorphism.