Free Lattices Department of Mathematics University of Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 Ralph@@Math.Hawaii.Edu MFF, Charles Universi
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Free Lattices Ralph Freese Department of Mathematics University of Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 ralph@@math.hawaii.edu Jaroslav Jeˇzek MFF, Charles University Sokolovsk´a83 18600 Praha 8 Czech Republic jezek@@karlin.mff.cuni.cz J. B. Nation Department of Mathematics University of Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 jb@@math.hawaii.edu 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 06B25; Secondary 06–04, 68Q25, 06A06, 06B20 This research supported by NSF Grants DMS–9204481 and DMS–9122011. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter I. Whitman’s Solution to the Word Problem 9 1. Basic Concepts from Lattice Theory 9 2. Free Lattices 13 3. Canonical Form 20 4. Continuity 25 5. Fixed Point Free Polynomials and Incompleteness 26 6. Sublattices of Free Lattices 30 Chapter II. Bounded Homomorphisms and Related Concepts 35 1. Bounded Homomorphisms 35 2. Continuity 48 3. Doubling and Congruences on a Finite Lattice 49 4. A Refinement of the D Relation 59 5. Semidistributive Lattices 64 6. Splitting Lattices 72 7. Day’s Theorem: Free Lattices are Weakly Atomic 81 8. Applications to Congruence Varieties 85 Chapter III. Covers in Free Lattices 89 1. Elementary Theorems on Covers in FL(X) 89 2. J–closed Sets and the Standard Epimorphism 94 3. Finite Lower Bounded Lattices 99 4. The Lattice L ⊔ (w) 102 5. Syntactic Algorithms 105 6. Examples 110 7. Connected Components and the Bottom of FL(X) 115 Chapter IV. Day’s Theorem Revisited 119 Chapter V. Sublattices of Free Lattices and Projective Lattices 125 1. Projective Lattices 125 2. The Free Lattice Generated by an Ordered Set 136 3. Finite Sublattices of Free Lattices 143 4. Related Topics 166 iii iv CONTENTS 5. Finite Subdirectly Irreducible Sublattices of Free Lattices 170 6. Summary 173 CONTENTS v Chapter VI. Totally Atomic Elements 179 1. Characterization 179 2. Canonical Form of Kappa of a Totally Atomic Element 187 3. The Role of Totally Atomic Elements 192 Chapter VII. Finite Intervals and Connected Components 199 1. Chains of Covers 199 2. Finite Intervals 204 3. Three Element Intervals 207 4. Connected Components 212 Chapter VIII. Singular and Semisingular Elements 225 1. Semisingular Elements 225 2. Singular Elements 233 Chapter IX. Tschantz’s Theorem and Maximal Chains 237 1. Tschantz’s Theorem 237 2. Coverless Elements 243 3. Maximal Chains 244 Chapter X. Infinite Intervals 249 1. Tschantz Triples 249 2. Join Irreducible Elements that are not Canonical Joinands 262 3. Splittings of a Free Lattice 264 Chapter XI. Term Rewrite Systems and Varieties of Lattices 271 1. Term Rewrite Systems 272 2. NoACTRSforLatticeTheory 275 3. An Extension 278 4. The Variety Generated by L ⊔ (w) 280 5. A Lattice Variety with AC TRS 288 6. More Varieties with AC TRS 295 Open Problems 301 Bibliography 303 List of Symbols 311 Index 313 Introduction This monograph covers the fascinating subject of free lattices. The arithmetic of free lattices is interesting and their structure is surpris- ingly complex. Although free lattices do have several nice properties, some reminiscent of properties of distributive lattices, discovering their nature is not easy. This book presents a thorough development of the structure of free lattices. A brief history. Although Richard Dedekind found the free mod- ular lattice on three generators in 1900, Thoralf Skolem showed the word problem for finitely presented lattices had a uniform solution in 1920, and Garrett Birkhoff showed the free lattice on three generators was infinite, substantial insight into the nature of free lattices really began with the two papers [132, 133] of Philip Whitman which ap- peared in 1941 and 1942. In these he solved the word problem for free lattices and showed that there was a unique shortest term representing each element of the free lattice, known as the canonical form. He also established a strong connection between this syntactic notion and the arithmetic of the lattice. He showed that the canonical form is the best way to represent an element in a very natural lattice theoretical sense. Using this interplay, he was able to prove several strong results about free lattices; for example, the free lattice on a countably infinite generating set is embeddable in the one on a three element generating set. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, R. Dean, B. J´onsson, F. Galvin, and J. Kiefer obtained further structural results about free lattices. One of their primary interests was sublattices of free lattices, particularly finite sublattices. As part of his solution to the word problem, Whitman had shown that free lattices satisfy an important property now known as Whitman’s condition, which states that the relation a b c d can hold in a free lattice only in one of the four trivial ways:∧ ≤ ∨ a c d, b c d, a b c, or a b d. ≤ ∨ ≤ ∨ ∧ ≤ ∧ ≤ J´onsson showed that free lattices and all their sublattices satisfy a weak form of distributivity known as semidistributivity. As part of 1 2 INTRODUCTION their attack on the problem of characterizing finite sublattices of free lattices, J´onsson and Kiefer showed that if a lattice satisfies Whitman’s condition and has a set of five elements, no four of which join above the fifth, then it is infinite. This implies that the breadth of a finite sublattice of a free lattice is at most four and that there is a nontrivial lattice equation true in all finite sublattices of a free lattice. Chapter I presents these and other classical results after first giving Whitman’s solution to the word problem and other basic results. It also shows that free lattices are continuous, not complete, and that free lattices have a unary polynomial which is fixed point free. The first chapter is suitable as an introduction to free lattices in, say, a course on lattice theory or algebra. In the paper by J´onsson and Kiefer it was conjectured that a finite lattice could be embedded into a free lattice if and only if it satisfies Whitman’s condition and is semidistributive. J´onsson worked on this conjecture, producing some unpublished notes that influenced further investigations by others. Ralph McKenzie’s important paper [99] uses J´onsson’s notes in the characterization of finite projective lattices. A great deal of work was put into J´onsson’s conjecture, as it was usually termed. J. B. Nation finally confirmed the conjecture in a deep paper [104] appearing in 1982. Nation’s proof is based on the approach de- veloped in J´onsson’s notes. This theorem appears in Chapter V, which also contains a characterization of projective lattices and other results on sublattices of free lattices. The notion of covering, one element being covered by another, de- noted a b, naturally leads to several intriguing questions and plays an extremely≺ important role in many of the deeper results on free lat- tices. Consequently, the theory of the covering relation in free lattices is well developed in this monograph. Whitman was the first to exhibit coverings in free lattices: he showed, for example, that the meet of all but one of the generators covers the meet of all of the generators. R. Dean, in unpublished work, showed that there were elements that covered no other element. When a b, we say a is covered by b and a is a lower cover of b. ≺ When a b (in any lattice), there is a unique maximal congruence relation, ψ(a,≺ b), not containing a, b . McKenzie [99] showed that the homomorphic image of the free latticeh i corresponding to this congruence relation is a finite, subdirectly irreducible lattice with the additional property that each element of this lattice has a least and a greatest preimage in the free lattice, i.e., the natural homomorphism is bounded. These lattices, which are called splitting lattices, and the corresponding bounded homomorphisms give an effective tool for studying covers in INTRODUCTION 3 free lattices. For example, with the aid of his techniques, McKenzie was able to show that deciding if a b holds in a free lattice is recursive. Chapter II gives a detailed≺ coverage of bounded homomorphisms and splitting lattices. J´onsson’s unpublished notes studied certain de- pendency relations in lattices. Although on the face it would not ap- pear so, these relations are closely related to bounded homomorphisms. These and other relations are covered thoroughly in a general setting in this chapter. The chapter includes applications of these ideas and results to several areas of lattice theory and algebra, such as projective lattices, varieties of lattices, and the equational theory of congruence lattices of algebraic systems. The dependency relations of this chapter give an efficient representation of congruences on a finite lattice, fa- cilitating fast algorithms for determining such properties as subdirect irreducibility and simplicity, which are developed in Chapter XI. In a significant paper [24], Alan Day, using his doubling construc- tion, was able to prove that the variety generated by all splitting lat- tices was in fact all lattices. This implies that free lattices are weakly atomic: every nontrivial interval contains a covering. We present two proofs of this result; the first is in Chapter II. In Chapter IV we prove a somewhat stronger version of Day’s Theorem, useful for other results on free lattices. Several basic questions about covers and about the structure of free lattices remained. Given an element, could one decide if it was covered by any other element? Could one effectively find all such covers? Is there a coverless element: one which covers no element and is covered by no element? How long could a chain of covers in a free lattice be? These questions were settled by Freese and Nation in a paper [62] which thoroughly developed the theory of covers in free lattices.