| Abstract: | Given any morphism, we construct extensions of the original category in which this morphism admits certain factorizations, in particular a (retraction, section)-factorization. To this end, we solve the word problem for a certain type of systems of generators and relations for categories. This also enables us to prove preservation properties for the said extensions, e.g. preservation of a pair of diagonalizing classes of epimorphisms and monomorphisms.Iterating such extension processes, we obtain factorizable extensions of categories; in particular, we construct a free proper factorization structure on a given category, which leads to a characterization of preimages of proper factorization structures under full embeddings. As a further application, we characterize an absoluteness property regarding factorizations of functorial images of a morphism. |
