Predicative toposes

We explain the motivation for looking for a predicative analogue of the notion of a topos and propose two definitions. For both notions of a predicative topos we will present the basic results, providing the groundwork for future work in this area

The Herbrand Topos

We define a new topos, the Herbrand topos, inspired by the modified realizability topos and our earlier work on Herbrand realizability. We also introduce the category of Herbrand assemblies and characterise these as the double-negation-separated objects in the Herbrand topos. In addition, we show that the category of sets is included as the category of double-negation-sheaves and prove that the inclusion functor preserves and reflects validity of first-order formulas

Types are weak omega-groupoids

We define a notion of weak omega-category internal to a model of Martin-L\"of type theory, and prove that each type bears a canonical weak omega-category structure obtained from the tower of iterated identity types over that type. We show that the omega-categories arising in this way are in fact omega-groupoids.Comment: 28 pages; v2: final journal versio

Noncommutativity as a colimit

Every partial algebra is the colimit of its total subalgebras. We prove this result for partial Boolean algebras (including orthomodular lattices) and the new notion of partial C*-algebras (including noncommutative C*-algebras), and variations such as partial complete Boolean algebras and partial AW*-algebras. The first two results are related by taking projections. As corollaries we find extensions of Stone duality and Gelfand duality. Finally, we investigate the extent to which the Bohrification construction, that works on partial C*-algebras, is functorial.Comment: 22 pages; updated theorem 15, added propoisition 3