D\'ecompositions \`a la Steinberg sur une cat\'egorie additive

Abstract

We give a description of simple functors taking finitely generated values, from a small additive category to the category of vector spaces over a field. This result is analogous to Steinberg's tensor product theorems in group representation theory. Our results rest on the notion of polynomial functor introduced by Eilenberg and Mac Lane. We give applications to representations of general linear groups or to finiteness properties of functor categories.