Resumen de Hopfian and Co-Hopfian objects

K. Varadarajan

• The aim of the present paper is to study Hopfian and Co-Hopfian objects in categories like the category of rings, the module categories A-mod and mod-A for any ring A. Using Stone's representation theorem any Boolean ring can be regarded as the ring A of clopen subsets of compact Hausdorff totally disconnected space X. It turns out that the Boolean ring A will be Hopfian (resp. co-Hopfian) if and only if the space X is co-Hopfian (resp. Hopfian) in the category Top. For any compact Hausdorff space X let CR(X) (resp. CC(X)) denote the R (resp. C)-algebra of real (resp. complex) valued continuous functions on X. Using Gelfand's representation theorem we will prove that CR(X) (CC(X)) is Hopfian (respectively co-Hopfian) as an R(C) algebra if and only if X is co-Hopfian (respectively Hopfian) as an object of Top. We also study Hopfian and co-Hopfian compact topological manifolds.