Homomorphisms on infinite direct products of groups, rings and monoids

We study properties of a group, abelian group, ring, or monoid $B$ which (a) guarantee that every homomorphism from an infinite direct product $\prod_I A_i$ of objects of the same sort onto $B$ factors through the direct product of finitely many ultraproducts of the $A_i$ (possibly after composition with the natural map $B\to B/Z(B)$ or some variant), and/or (b) guarantee that when a map does so factor (and the index set has reasonable cardinality), the ultrafilters involved must be principal. A number of open questions, and topics for further investigation, are noted.Comment: 26 pages. Copy at http://math.berkeley.edu/~gbergman/papers may be updated more frequently than arXiv copy. Version 2 has minor revisions in wording etc. from version

On the rational subset problem for groups

We use language theory to study the rational subset problem for groups and monoids. We show that the decidability of this problem is preserved under graph of groups constructions with finite edge groups. In particular, it passes through free products amalgamated over finite subgroups and HNN extensions with finite associated subgroups. We provide a simple proof of a result of Grunschlag showing that the decidability of this problem is a virtual property. We prove further that the problem is decidable for a direct product of a group G with a monoid M if and only if membership is uniformly decidable for G-automata subsets of M. It follows that a direct product of a free group with any abelian group or commutative monoid has decidable rational subset membership.Comment: 19 page

A survey on spectral multiplicities of ergodic actions

Given a transformation $T$ of a standard measure space $(X,\mu)$, let \Cal M(T) denote the set of spectral multiplicities of the Koopman operator $U_T$ defined in $L^2(X,\mu)\ominus\Bbb C$ by $U_Tf:=f\circ T$. It is discussed in this survey paper which subsets of $\Bbb N\cup\{\infty\}$ are realizable as \Cal M(T) for various $T$: ergodic, weakly mixing, mixing, Gaussian, Poisson, ergodic infinite measure preserving, etc. The corresponding constructions are considered in detail. Generalizations to actions of Abelian locally compact second countable groups are also discussed