Aspects of connectedness in metric frames.

Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2019.Abstract available in PDF file

The connected Vietoris powerlocale

The connected Vietoris powerlocale is defined as a strong monad Vc on the category of locales. VcX is a sublocale of Johnstone's Vietoris powerlocale VX, a localic analogue of the Vietoris hyperspace, and its points correspond to the weakly semifitted sublocales of X that are “strongly connected”. A product map ×:VcX×VcY→Vc(X×Y) shows that the product of two strongly connected sublocales is strongly connected. If X is locally connected then VcX is overt. For the localic completion of a generalized metric space Y, the points of are certain Cauchy filters of formal balls for the finite power set with respect to a Vietoris metric. \ud Application to the point-free real line gives a choice-free constructive version of the Intermediate Value Theorem and Rolle's Theorem. \ud \ud The work is topos-valid (assuming natural numbers object). Vc is a geometric constructio

Succinctness in subsystems of the spatial mu-calculus

In this paper we systematically explore questions of succinctness in modal logics employed in spatial reasoning. We show that the closure operator, despite being less expressive, is exponentially more succinct than the limit-point operator, and that the $\mu$-calculus is exponentially more succinct than the equally-expressive tangled limit operator. These results hold for any class of spaces containing at least one crowded metric space or containing all spaces based on ordinals below $\omega^\omega$, with the usual limit operator. We also show that these results continue to hold even if we enrich the less succinct language with the universal modality

Infinite networks and variation of conductance functions in discrete Laplacians

For a given infinite connected graph $G=(V,E)$ and an arbitrary but fixed conductance function $c$, we study an associated graph Laplacian $\Delta_{c}$; it is a generalized difference operator where the differences are measured across the edges $E$ in $G$; and the conductance function $c$ represents the corresponding coefficients. The graph Laplacian (a key tool in the study of infinite networks) acts in an energy Hilbert space $\mathscr{H}_{E}$ computed from $c$. Using a certain Parseval frame, we study the spectral theoretic properties of graph Laplacians. In fact, for fixed $c$, there are two versions of the graph Laplacian, one defined naturally in the $l^{2}$ space of $V$, and the other in $\mathscr{H}_{E}$. The first is automatically selfadjoint, but the second involves a Krein extension. We prove that, as sets, the two spectra are the same, aside from the point 0. The point zero may be in the spectrum of the second, but not the first. We further study the fine structure of the respective spectra as the conductance function varies; showing now how the spectrum changes subject to variations in the function $c$.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figure

Projections and idempotents with fixed diagonal and the homotopy problem for unit tight frames

We investigate the topological and metric structure of the set of idempotent operators and projections which have prescribed diagonal entries with respect to a fixed orthonormal basis of a Hilbert space. As an application, we settle some cases of conjectures of Larson, Dykema, and Strawn on the connectedness of the set of unit-norm tight frames.Comment: New title and introductio