An infinite natural sum

As far as algebraic properties are concerned, the usual addition on the class of ordinal numbers is not really well behaved; for example, it is not commutative, nor left cancellative etc. In a few cases, the natural Hessemberg sum is a better alternative, since it shares most of the usual properties of the addition on the naturals. A countably infinite version of the natural sum has been used in a recent paper by V\"a\"an\"anen and Wang, with applications to infinitary logics. We provide an order theoretical characterization of this operation. We show that this countable natural sum differs from the more usual infinite ordinal sum only for an initial finite "head" and agrees on the remaining infinite "tail". We show how to evaluate the countable natural sum just by computing a finite natural sum. Various kinds of infinite mixed sums of ordinals are discussed.Comment: v3 added a remark connected with surreal number

Circle Decompositions of Surfaces

We determine which connected surfaces can be partitioned into topological circles. There are exactly seven such surfaces up to homeomorphism: those of finite type, of Euler characteristic zero, and with compact boundary components. As a byproduct, we get that any circle decomposition of a surface is upper semicontinuous.Comment: 9 pages, final version, to appear in Topology and its Applications (2010). A few missprints have been correcte

Analiza (t.1, cz.2): Działania nieskończone

278 s.

The Bergman-Shelah Preorder on Transformation Semigroups

This is the peer-reviewed version of the following article: Mesyan, Z., Mitchell, J. D., Morayne, M. and Péresse, Y. H. (2012), Mathematical Logic Quarterly, Vol. 58: 424–433, 'The Bergman-Shelah preorder on transformation semigroups', which has been published in final form at doi:10.1002/malq.201200002. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. Copyright © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. http://www.interscience.wiley.com/Let \nat^\nat be the semigroup of all mappings on the natural numbers \nat, and let $U$ and $V$ be subsets of \nat^\nat. We write $U\preccurlyeq V$ if there exists a countable subset $C$ of \nat^\nat such that $U$ is contained in the subsemigroup generated by $V$ and $C$. We give several results about the structure of the preorder $\preccurlyeq$. In particular, we show that a certain statement about this preorder is equivalent to the Continuum Hypothesis. The preorder $\preccurlyeq$ is analogous to one introduced by Bergman and Shelah on subgroups of the symmetric group on \nat. The results in this paper suggest that the preorder on subsemigroups of \nat^\nat is much more complicated than that on subgroups of the symmetric group.Peer reviewe

Homotopy classes that are trivial mod F

If F is a collection of topological spaces, then a homotopy class \alpha in [X,Y] is called F-trivial if \alpha_* = 0: [A,X] --> [A,Y] for all A in F. In this paper we study the collection Z_F(X,Y) of all F-trivial homotopy classes in [X,Y] when F = S, the collection of spheres, F = M, the collection of Moore spaces, and F = \Sigma, the collection of suspensions. Clearly Z_\Sigma (X,Y) \subset Z_M(X,Y) \subset Z_S(X,Y), and we find examples of finite complexes X and Y for which these inclusions are strict. We are also interested in Z_F(X) = Z_F(X,X), which under composition has the structure of a semigroup with zero. We show that if X is a finite dimensional complex and F = S, M or \Sigma, then the semigroup Z_F(X) is nilpotent. More precisely, the nilpotency of Z_F(X) is bounded above by the F-killing length of X, a new numerical invariant which equals the number of steps it takes to make X contractible by successively attaching cones on wedges of spaces in F, and this in turn is bounded above by the F-cone length of X. We then calculate or estimate the nilpotency of Z_F(X) when F = S, M or \Sigma for the following classes of spaces: (1) projective spaces (2) certain Lie groups such as SU(n) and Sp(n). The paper concludes with several open problems.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol1/agt-1-19.abs.html Version 2: reference to Christensen adde

Isometry groups among topological groups

It is shown that a topological group G is topologically isomorphic to the isometry group of a (complete) metric space iff G coincides with its G-delta-closure in the Rajkov completion of G (resp. if G is Rajkov-complete). It is also shown that for every Polish (resp. compact Polish; locally compact Polish) group G there is a complete (resp. proper) metric d on X inducing the topology of X such that G is isomorphic to Iso(X,d) where X = l_2 (resp. X = Q; X = Q\{point} where Q is the Hilbert cube). It is demonstrated that there are a separable Banach space E and a nonzero vector e in E such that G is isomorphic to the group of all (linear) isometries of E which leave the point e fixed. Similar results are proved for an arbitrary complete topological group.Comment: 30 page

Making triangulations 4-connected using flips

We show that any combinatorial triangulation on n vertices can be transformed into a 4-connected one using at most floor((3n - 9)/5) edge flips. We also give an example of an infinite family of triangulations that requires this many flips to be made 4-connected, showing that our bound is tight. In addition, for n >= 19, we improve the upper bound on the number of flips required to transform any 4-connected triangulation into the canonical triangulation (the triangulation with two dominant vertices), matching the known lower bound of 2n - 15. Our results imply a new upper bound on the diameter of the flip graph of 5.2n - 33.6, improving on the previous best known bound of 6n - 30.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to CGTA special issue for CCCG 2011. Conference version available at http://2011.cccg.ca/PDFschedule/papers/paper34.pd