An abelian category with enough projectives is hereditary when every subobject of a projective object is projective. For with projective, dimension shifting gives . Hence hereditaryness is equivalent to vanishing of for every additive right exact functor into any abelian category, by projectivity detected by all first left derived functors. It is also equivalent to left exactness of every : the derived long exact sequence gives injectivity of when vanishes, and applying left exactness to the displayed sequence proves the converse.
An abelian category is an additive category with kernels in a category and cokernels in a category in which the canonical comparison from coimage to image of every morphism is an isomorphism. This is the standard image-coimage form of the definition, equivalently expressed by normality of every monomorphism and epimorphism. Additivity means abelian-group hom-sets with bilinear composition, a zero object and finite biproducts. A sequence is exact at an object when the image of the incoming morphism is the kernel in a category of the outgoing one.
For , construct and . The universal properties give : first kills its kernel in a category and factors through ; then the resulting map is killed by because is epic, so it factors through . The comparison is invertible by the abelian axiom. Cokernels in a category are epic and kernels in a category monic, directly by uniqueness in their universal properties, so is epic and monic. Thus .
In a short exact sequence , we have and , up to the canonical isomorphisms. If retracts , the map kills and factors as for some . Composing with gives , so epicity gives . Conversely if , then is killed by and factors as . Composing with gives , so monicity gives . Consequently
In that case .
For the derived-functor requests, use additive right exact functors, as customary in abelian homological algebra. An abelian category with enough projectives permits an augmented projective resolution , obtained by repeatedly taking an epimorphism from a projective onto the previous kernel in a category. Apply and define
Projective lifts construct maps of resolutions; the comparison and chain-homotopy results make the construction independent of choices and functorial. For a short exact sequence, the horseshoe construction produces a degreewise split short exact sequence of resolutions, hence of their images under additive . Its homology objects give the long exact sequence
This supplies the requested sketch; detailed comparison and functoriality proofs are not needed here.
A projective object has a resolution concentrated in degree zero, so for every such . Conversely choose with projective, and take with target . Precomposition makes this covariant to the opposite category. The usual left exactness of contravariant Hom, which follows directly from the cokernel in a category universal property, says exactly that this is right exact in that opposite target. If , the long exact sequence and make monic in . Equivalently,
is epic, hence surjective, in abelian groups. The identity of has a preimage, giving a retraction of . The sequence splits, and is a direct summand of , hence projective: a lifting problem for extends along the projection , is solved for , and restricts along the summand inclusion. Therefore
This is projectivity detected by all first left derived functors. The following parts prove the three requested equivalent formulations of a hereditary abelian category with enough projectives.