The monads of classical algebra are seldom weakly cartesian

Abstract

This paper begins a systematic study of weakly cartesian properties of monads that determine familiar varieties of universal algebras. While these properties clearly fail to hold for groups, rings, and many other related classical algebraic structures, their analysis becomes non-trivial in the case of semimodules over semirings, to which our main results are devoted. In particular necessary and sufficient conditions on a semiring S, under which the free semimodule monad has: (a) its underlying functor weakly cartesian, (b) its unit a weakly cartesian natural transformation, (c) its multiplication a weakly cartesian natural transformation, are obtained.