Geometrical dualities for Łukasiewicz logic

This is the transcript of a featured talk given on the 15th of September 2011 at the XIX Congeresso dell’Unione Matematica Italiana held in Bologna, Italy.  It is based on a joint work with Vincenzo Marra of the University of Milan that was published in Vincenzo Marra and Luca Spada. The dual adjunction between MV-algebras and Tychonoff spacesStudia Logica 100(1-2):253-278, 2012. Special issue of Studia Logica in memoriam Leo Esakia (L. Beklemishev, G. Bezhanishvili, D. Mundici and Y. Venema Editors).  

The article develops a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras (the algebraic equivalents of Łukasiewicz logic) and subspaces of Tychonoff cubes, endowed with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. Such a dual adjunction restricts to a duality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of Tychonoff cubes. Further the duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained from the general adjunction by a further specialisation. The treatment is aimed at emphasising the generality of the framework considered here in the prototypical case of MV-algebras.

Geometrical dualities for Łukasiewicz logic

Two isomorphism criteria for directed colimits

Using the general notions of finitely presentable and finitely generated object introduced by Gabriel and Ulmer in 1971, we prove that, in any (locally small) category, two sequences of finitely presentable objects and morphisms (or two sequences of finitely generated objects and monomorphisms) have isomorphic colimits (=direct limits) if, and only if, they are confluent. The latter means  that the two given sequences  can be connected by a back-and-forth chain of morphisms that is cofinal on each side, and commutes with the sequences at each finite stage. In several concrete situations,  analogous isomorphism criteria are typically obtained by ad hoc arguments.  The abstract results given here can  play the useful  rôle of discerning  the general from the specific in situations of actual interest. We illustrate by applying them to varieties  of algebras, on the one hand, and to dimension groups—the ordered $K_{0}$ of approximately finite-dimensional  C*-algebras—on the other. The first application encompasses such classical examples as Kurosh’s isomorphism criterion for countable torsion-free Abelian groups of finite rank. The second application yields the Bratteli-Elliott  Isomorphism Criterion for dimension groups. Finally, we  discuss  Bratteli’s original isomorphism criterion for approximately finite-dimensional C*-algebras, and show that his result does not follow from ours.

Two isomorphism criteria for directed colimits

Duality, projectivity, and unification in Łukasiewicz logic and MV-algebras

We prove that the unification type of Lukasiewicz infinite-valued propositional logic and of its equivalent algebraic semantics, the variety of MV-algebras,is nullary. The proof rests upon Ghilardi’s algebraic characterisation of unification types in terms of projective objects, recent progress by Cabrer and Mundici in the investigation of projective MV-algebras, the categorical duality between finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, and, finally, a  homotopy-theoretic argument that exploits  lifts of continuous maps to the universal covering space of the circle. We discuss the background to such diverse tools. In particular, we offer a detailed proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra – a fundamental result that, albeit known to specialists, seems to appear in print here for the first time.

Duality, projectivity, and unification in Łukasiewicz logic and MV-algebras

 

The dual adjunction between MV-algebras and Tychonoff spaces

We offer a proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, a folklore and yet fundamental result. Our approach develops first a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras  and subspaces of  Tychonoff cubes, endowed  with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. We then show that this dual adjunction restricts to aduality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of  Tychonoff cubes. The duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained by a further specialisation.  Our treatment is aimed at showing exactly which parts of the basic theory of MV-algebras are needed in order to establish these results, with an eye towards future generalisations.

The dual adjunction between MV-algebras and Tychonoff spaces

Representation of MV-algebras by regular ultrapowers of [0,1]

We present a uniform version of Di Nola Theorem, this enables to embed all MV-algebras of a bounded cardinality in an algebra of functions with values in a single non-standard ultrapower of the real interval [0,1]. This result also implies the existence, for any cardinal \alpha, of a single MV-algebra in which all infinite MV-algebras of cardinality at most $\alpha$ embed.  Recasting the above construction with iterated ultrapowers, we show how to construct such an algebra of values in a definable way, thus providing a sort of  “canonical” set of values for the functional representation.

Representation of MV-algebras by regular ultrapowers of [0,1]

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