Tuesday, May 31, 2016

category theory - How to understand quasi-inverse of a function f∘g∘f = f?

Recently I was studying the quasi-inverse. Before I studied the quasi-inverse, I revisited the inverse and the left-right inverse.


inverse function:


Let f:XY, g:YX is inverse of f, if only if, fg=idY and gf=idX.


It is easy to understand.


right-inverse function:


Let f:XY, g:YX is right-inverse of f (or section of f ), if only if , fg=idY.


It means that f must be surjective and g must be injective. It is also very intuitive.



Now I start to study quasi-inverse:


One thing I have to explain here is that the "quasi-inverse" does not seem to be a precise terminology and I can't find any information about quasi-inverse in wikipedia or nlab. (I study it because the form of "quasi-inverse" appears in many branches of mathematics, e.g. in category theory, adjoint functors needs to satisfy triangular identity. Although they are completely different, they are similar in form)


Here, I use the definition of quasi-inverse from https://planetmath.org/QuasiinverseOfAFunction



Let f:X→Y be a function from sets X to Y. A quasi-inverse g of f is a function g such that



  1. g:Z→X where ran⁡(f)⊆Z⊆Y, and




  2. f∘g∘f=f, where ∘ denotes functional composition operation.




Note that ran⁡(f) is the range of f.



In order to understand this formula intuitively, I drew the following diagram


enter image description here


This formula seems to tell us that


A function g is a quasi-inverse of a function f, if the restriction of g to ran(f) is the right-inverse of f, i.e.


fgjran(f)=jran(f)


Note: jS denote identity function on S.


My first question is, is this conclusion correct? i.e.



fgjran(f)=jran(f)fgf=f


If this conclusion is correct, how to prove it?


It is easy to prove , but how to prove the opposite?


If this conclusion is wrong, anyone can give me an example which satisfies fgf=f but not satisfies fgjran(f)=jran(f)?


I may have missed some key things...


The second question is, if I have fgf=f and gfg=g, is there any interesting conclusion? e.g. it can be concluded that f and g are bijection?


Very thanks.


PS: The reference of https://planetmath.org/QuasiinverseOfAFunction mentioned a book "Probabilistic Metric Spaces". In this book, the author mentioned another definition of quasi-inverse, which is stronger than the two quasi-inverses here, but it is another topic.

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