Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 75 8 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
A coherent category is a regular category with finite unions of subobjects, including the empty union, stable under pullback. Thus it has finite limits, pullback-stable regular-epimorphism/monomorphism image factorizations, and pullback-stable finite joins in each subobject lattice.
Write and . Their inclusions give a commutative squareTo establish the pushout property, take arrows , agreeing on . Regard their graphs as subobjects of and form their union . Internally, this relation says that a point of is related to its -value when it lies in , or to its -value when it lies in .
The relation is total because every point of belongs to at least one of . It is single-valued: two witnesses in the same summand give the same value by functionality of that map; witnesses in different summands have their shared point in , where the two maps agree. By the relation argument proved in Question 7's unheaded continuation, the projection is both a regular epimorphism and monic, hence an isomorphism. It consequently gives a map restricting to .
For uniqueness, the equalizer of two possible maps contains and , hence contains their union and is all of . Thus the square is a pushout, provingThis is the unions of subobjects are pushouts property; it does not assume arbitrary pushouts already exist in a coherent category.