Drazin inverses in categories

Drazin inverses are a fundamental algebraic structure which have been extensively deployed in semigroup theory, ring theory, and matrix theory. Drazin inverses can also be defined for endomorphisms in any category. However, beyond a paper by Puystjens and Robinson from 1987, there has been almost no further development of Drazin inverses in category theory. Here we provide a survey of the theory of Drazin inverses from a categorical perspective. We introduce Drazin categories, in which every endomorphism has a Drazin inverse, and provide various examples including the category of matrices over a field, the category of finite length modules over a ring, and finite set enriched categories. We also introduce the notion of expressive rank and prove that a category with expressive rank is Drazin. Moreover, we not only study Drazin inverses in mere categories, but also in additive categories and dagger categories. In an arbitrary category, we show how a Drazin inverse corresponds to an isomorphism in the idempotent splitting, as well as explain how Drazin inverses relate to Leinster’s notion of eventual image duality. In additive categories, we consider core-nilpotent decompositions, image-kernel decompositions, and Fitting decompositions. We also develop the notion of Drazin inverses for pairs of opposing maps, generalizing the usual notion of Drazin inverse for endomorphisms. As an application of this new kind of Drazin inverse, for dagger categories, we provide a novel characterization of the Moore-Penrose inverse in terms of being a Drazin inverse of the pair of a map and its adjoint.