On separability finiteness conditions in semigroups

Funding: The first author is grateful to EPSRC for financial support. The second author is grateful to the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of St Andrews for financial support.Taking residual finiteness as a starting point, we consider three related finiteness properties: weak subsemigroup separability, strong subsemigroup separability and complete separability. We investigate whether each of these properties is inherited by Schützenberger groups. The main result of this paper states that for a finitely generated commutative semigroup S, these three separability conditions coincide and are equivalent to every H -class of S being finite. We also provide examples to show that these properties in general differ for commutative semigroups and finitely generated semigroups. For a semigroup with finitely many H -classes, we investigate whether it has one of these properties if and only if all its Schützenberger groups have the property.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Languages associated with saturated formations of groups

In a previous paper, the authors have shown that Eilenberg's variety theorem can be extended to more general structures, called formations. In this paper, we give a general method to describe the languages corresponding to saturated formations of groups, which are widely studied in group theory. We recover in this way a number of known results about the languages corresponding to the classes of nilpotent groups, soluble groups and supersoluble groups. Our method also applies to new examples, like the class of groups having a Sylow tower.The authors are supported by Proyecto MTM2010-19938-C03-01 from MICINN (Spain). The first author acknowledges support from MEC. The second author is supported by the project ANR 2010 BLAN 0202 02 FREC. The third author was supported by the Grant PAID-02-09 from Universitat Politècnica de València

Promotion on oscillating and alternating tableaux and rotation of matchings and permutations

Using Henriques' and Kamnitzer's cactus groups, Sch\"utzenberger's promotion and evacuation operators on standard Young tableaux can be generalised in a very natural way to operators acting on highest weight words in tensor products of crystals. For the crystals corresponding to the vector representations of the symplectic groups, we show that Sundaram's map to perfect matchings intertwines promotion and rotation of the associated chord diagrams, and evacuation and reversal. We also exhibit a map with similar features for the crystals corresponding to the adjoint representations of the general linear groups. We prove these results by applying van Leeuwen's generalisation of Fomin's local rules for jeu de taquin, connected to the action of the cactus groups by Lenart, and variants of Fomin's growth diagrams for the Robinson-Schensted correspondence

The Covering Problem

An important endeavor in computer science is to understand the expressive power of logical formalisms over discrete structures, such as words. Naturally, "understanding" is not a mathematical notion. This investigation requires therefore a concrete objective to capture this understanding. In the literature, the standard choice for this objective is the membership problem, whose aim is to find a procedure deciding whether an input regular language can be defined in the logic under investigation. This approach was cemented as the right one by the seminal work of Sch\"utzenberger, McNaughton and Papert on first-order logic and has been in use since then. However, membership questions are hard: for several important fragments, researchers have failed in this endeavor despite decades of investigation. In view of recent results on one of the most famous open questions, namely the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first-order logic, an explanation may be that membership is too restrictive as a setting. These new results were indeed obtained by considering more general problems than membership, taking advantage of the increased flexibility of the enriched mathematical setting. This opens a promising research avenue and efforts have been devoted at identifying and solving such problems for natural fragments. Until now however, these problems have been ad hoc, most fragments relying on a specific one. A unique new problem replacing membership as the right one is still missing. The main contribution of this paper is a suitable candidate to play this role: the Covering Problem. We motivate this problem with 3 arguments. First, it admits an elementary set theoretic formulation, similar to membership. Second, we are able to reexplain or generalize all known results with this problem. Third, we develop a mathematical framework and a methodology tailored to the investigation of this problem

A generic characterization of generalized unary temporal logic and two-variable first-order logic

We investigate an operator on classes of languages. For each class $C$, it outputs a new class $FO^2(I_C)$ associated with a variant of two-variable first-order logic equipped with a signature$I_C$ built from $C$. For $C = \{\emptyset, A^*\}$, we get the variant $FO^2(<)$ equipped with the linear order. For $C = \{\emptyset, \{\varepsilon\},A^+, A^*\}$, we get the variant $FO^2(<,+1)$, which also includes the successor. If $C$ consists of all Boolean combinations of languages $A^*aA^*$ where $a$ is a letter, we get the variant $FO^2(<,Bet)$, which also includes ``between relations''. We prove a generic algebraic characterization of the classes $FO^2(I_C)$. It smoothly and elegantly generalizes the known ones for all aforementioned cases. Moreover, it implies that if $C$ has decidable separation (plus mild properties), then $FO^2(I_C)$ has a decidable membership problem. We actually work with an equivalent definition of \fodc in terms of unary temporal logic. For each class $C$, we consider a variant $TL(C)$ of unary temporal logic whose future/past modalities depend on $C$ and such that $TL(C) = FO^2(I_C)$. Finally, we also characterize $FL(C)$ and $PL(C)$, the pure-future and pure-past restrictions of $TL(C)$. These characterizations as well imply that if \Cs is a class with decidable separation, then $FL(C)$ and $PL(C)$ have decidable membership

Todd-Coxeter methods for inverse monoids

Let P be the inverse monoid presentation (X|U) for the inverse monoid M, let π be the set of generators for a right congruence on M and let u Є M. Using the work of J. Stephen [15], the current work demonstrates a coset enumeration technique for the R-class Rᵤ similar to the coset enumeration algorithm developed by J. A. Todd and H. S. M. Coxeter for groups. Furthermore it is demonstrated how to test whether Rᵤ = Rᵥ, for u, v Є M and so a technique for enumerating inverse monoids is described. This technique is generalised to enumerate the H-classes of M. The algorithms have been implemented in GAP 3.4.4 [25], and have been used to analyse some examples given in Chapter 6. The thesis concludes by a related discussion of normal forms and automaticity of free inverse semigroups