implicational class
In this entry, we extend the notion of an equational class (or a variety) to a more general notion known as an implicational class (or a quasivariety). Recall that an equational class is a class of algebraic systems satisfying a set of “equations” and that is the smallest class satisfying . Typical examples are the varieties of groups, rings, or lattices.
An implicational class, loosely speaking, is the smallest class of algebraic systems satisfying a set of “implications”, where an implication has the form , where and are some sentences
. Formally, we define an equational implication in an algebraic system to be a sentence of the form
where each is an identity of the form for some -ary polynomials
and , and .
Definition. A class of algebraic systems of the same type (signature) is called an implicational class if there is a set of equational implications such that
Examples
- 1.
Any equational class is implicational. Each identity can be thought of as an equational implication . In other words, every algebra
satisfying the identity also satisfies the corresponding equational implication, and vice versa.
- 2.
The class of all Dedekind-finite rings. In addition to satisfying the identities for being a (unital) ring, each ring also satisfies the equational implication
- 3.
The class of all cancellation semigroups. In addition to satisfying the identities for being a semigroup
, each semigroup also satisfies the implications
- 4.
The class of all torsion free abelian groups
. In addition to satisfying the identities for being abelian groups, each group also satisfies the set of all implications
There is an equivalent formulation of an implicational class. Again, let be a class of algebraic systems of the same type (signature) . Define the following four “operations
” on the classes of algebraic systems of type :
- 1.
is the class of all isomorphic
copies of algebras in ,
- 2.
is the class of all subalgebras
of algebras in ,
- 3.
is the class of all product
of algebras in (including the empty products, which means includes the trivial algebra), and
- 4.
is the class of all ultraproducts
of algebras in .
Suppose is any one of the operations above, we say that is closed under operation if .
Definition. is said to be an algebraic class if is closed under , and is said to be a quasivariety if it is algebraic and is closed under .
It can be shown that a class of algebraic systems of the same type is implicational iff it is a quasivariety. Therefore, we may use the two terms interchangeably.
As we have seen earlier, a variety is a quasivariety. However, the converse is not true, as can be readily seen in the last example above, since a homomorphic image
of a torsion free abelian is in general not torsion free: the homomorphic image of is a subgroup
of , hence not torsion free.