Joint Laver diamonds and grounded forcing axioms

I explore two separate topics: the concept of jointness for set-theoretic guessing principles, and the notion of grounded forcing axioms. A family of guessing sequences is said to be joint if all of its members can guess any given family of targets independently and simultaneously. I primarily investigate jointness in the case of various kinds of Laver diamonds. In the case of measurable cardinals I show that, while the assertions that there are joint families of Laver diamonds of a given length get strictly stronger with increasing length, they are all equiconsistent. This is contrasted with the case of partially strong cardinals, where we can derive additional consistency strength, and ordinary diamond sequences, where large joint families exist whenever even one diamond sequence does. Grounded forcing axioms modify the usual forcing axioms by restricting the posets considered to a suitable ground model. I focus on the grounded Martin's axiom which states that Martin's axioms holds for posets coming from some ccc ground model. I examine the new axiom's effects on the cardinal characteristics of the continuum and show that it is quite a bit more robust under mild forcing than Martin's axiom itself.Comment: This is my PhD dissertatio

Goldblatt-Thomason Theorems for Modal Intuitionistic Logics

We prove Goldblatt-Thomason theorems for frames and models of a wide variety of modal intuitionistic logics, including ones studied by Wolter and Zakharyaschev, Goldblatt, Fischer Servi, and Plotkin and Sterling. We use the framework of dialgebraic logic to describe most of these logics and derive results in a uniform way

Extension of sectional pseudocomplementation in posets

Sectional pseudocomplementation (sp-complementation) on a poset is a partial operation $*$ which associates with every pair $(x,y)$ of elements, where $x \ge y$, the pseudocomplement $x*y$ of $x$ in the upper section $[y)$. Any total extension $\to$ of $*$ is said to be an extended sp-complementation and is considered as an implication-like operation. Extended sp-complementations have already be studied on semilattices and lattices. We describe several naturally arising classes of general posets with extended sp-complementation, present respective elementary properties of this operation, demonstrate that two other known attempts to isolate particular such classes are in fact not quite correct, and suggest suitable improvements.Comment: pdfLaTeX, 28 pages, contains LaTeX figures and tables. V2: Proposition 3.6 corrected, the final part of Section 3.3 reorganized, Remark 3 edited, Theorem 7.6 and Corollary 7.7 strengthened, proof of Theorem 7.10 edite

Every topos has an optimal noetherian form

The search, of almost a century long, for a unified axiomatic framework for establishing homomorphism theorems of classical algebra (such as Noether isomorphism theorems and homological diagram lemmas) has led to the notion of a `noetherian form', which is a generalization of an abelian category suitable to encompass categories of non-abelian algebraic structures (such as non-abelian groups, or rings with identity, or cocommutative Hopf algebras over any field, and many others). In this paper, we show that, surprisingly, even the category of sets, and more generally, any topos, fits under the framework of a noetherian form. Moreover, we give an intrinsic characterization of such noetherian form and show that it is very closely related to the known noetherian form of a semi-abelian category. In fact, we show that for a pointed category having finite products and sums, the existence of the type of noetherian form that any topos possesses is equivalent to the category being semi-abelian (this result is unexpected since only trivial toposes can be semi-abelian). We also show that these noetherian forms are optimal, in a suitable sense.Comment: 66 pages, submitted for publicatio

Contact semilattices

We devise exact conditions under which a join semilattice with a weak contact relation can be semilattice embedded into a Boolean algebra with an overlap contact relation, equivalently, into a distributive lattice with additive contact relation. A similar characterization is proved with respect to Boolean algebras and distributive lattices with weak contact, not necessarily additive, nor overlap.Comment: v3: noticed that former Condition (D2-) is pleonastic; added two new equivalent conditions in Theorem 3.2. We realized all this after the paper has been published: variations with respect to the published version are printed in a blue character. v2: solved a problem left open in v1; added a counterexample; a few fixe