Given a subobject of 1 in a topos, it's well known that one can `split' the topos into complementary open and closed subtoposes, and reconstruct the topos (up to equivalence) by applying Artin glueing to these two subtoposes. Hands up, all those of you who thought that the same thing works for quasitoposes ... I thought so! It isn't true, as I have just discovered. Certainly, given a strong subobject U >--> 1 in a quasitopos E, one can construct the `closed complement' of the open subquasitopos E/U, in exactly the same way as one does for a topos: let's denote it by C(U). It's also true that one has a `fringe functor' from E/U to C(U), and that one gets a comparison functor from E to the quasitopos obtained by glueing along this functor (again, the glueing construction works for quasitoposes just as it does for toposes). But, for this comparison to be an equivalence, one needs to know that the inverse image functors E --> E/U and E --> C(U) are (not just jointly faithful, but) jointly isomorphism-reflecting. And that can fail: I have a counterexample in a slice of the quasitopos of Frechet spaces (Elephant, A2.6.4(c). Has anyone noticed this failure before? If so, has anyone actually written it up? Peter Johnstone
Here are the details of the counterexample mentioned in my earlier e-mail, for anyone who wants to see them. Let E be the quasitopos of Frechet spaces (called subsequential spaces in my paper "On a topological topos"): all you need to know about this category is that it contains the category S of sequential spaces as a full subcategory, closed under limits (not under all colimits, but in fact all colimits that occur in the following discussion are preserved). All the action takes place inside S. Let N be the discrete space of natural numbers, and N+ its one-point compactification N \cup \{\infty\}. Let A be the space obtained from the disjoint union of two copies of N+ by identifying the two copies of \infty, and let A' be the disjoint union of N and N+. Clearly, there is a morphism A' \to A which is bijective on points (hence, both monic and epic) but not an isomorphism. However, if we regard A and A' as spaces over N+ in the obvious way, the morphism A' \to A becomes an isomorphism when we pull it back along the inclusion N \to N+, and also when we form the pushouts of A x N -------> A(') N+ | | v N since both such pushouts are isomorphic to N+. This says that, if we work in the quasitopos E/N+, the morphism A' \to A is mapped to an isomorphism in both the open subquasitopos E/N and its closed "complement". I should say that I came to consider this question as a result of a seminar talk today by Pawel Sobocinski, which raised the question of whether quasitoposes are quasi-adhesive categories. This example shows that the quasitopos of Frechet spaces is not quasi-adhesive. Peter Johnstone
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Prof. Peter Johnstone