Ideal Independence, Free Sequences, and the Ultrafilter Number

We make use of a forcing technique for extending Boolean algebras. The same type of forcing was employed in [BK81], [Kos99], and elsewhere. Using and modifying a lemma of Koszmider, and using CH, we obtain an atomless BA, A such that f(A) = smm(A) < u(A), answering questions raised by [Mon08] and [Mon11]

Syntactic Monoids in a Category

The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric monoidal closed category D. This allows for a uniform treatment of several notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic monoids of Rabin and Scott (D = sets), the syntactic semirings of Polak (D = semilattices), and the syntactic associative algebras of Reutenauer (D = vector spaces). Assuming that D is an entropic variety of algebras, we prove that the syntactic D-monoid of a language L can be constructed as a quotient of a free D-monoid modulo the syntactic congruence of L, and that it is isomorphic to the transition D-monoid of the minimal automaton for L in D. Furthermore, in case the variety D is locally finite, we characterize the regular languages as precisely the languages with finite syntactic D-monoids