Archive for March, 2009

MathWiki project is hiring

March 10, 2009

Apparently the formalized mathematics project at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL) that I wrote about previously did get some funding after all and they are hiring two people to work on it. The PhD position is for 4 years and the postdoc position is 3 years. I hope that a usable formalized mathematics wiki will be available earlier.

The postdoc position pays a “maximum salary”  of 3755 Euro per month. Such wording immediately makes me curious what is the minimum … .

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Interval arithmetic in groups – pass 2

March 1, 2009

This is a continuation of the Interval arithmetics in groups: Pass 1 post.

Let f: \mathcal{V}\times\mathcal{V} \rightarrow \mathcal{V} be a binary operation on a set \mathcal{V}. We will write this operation additively as f\langle x,y \rangle = x + y. Such operation defines another binary operation f^\mathcal{P} on on the powerset \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{V}) (set of subsets) of \mathcal{V} in a natural way: f^\mathcal{P} \langle X, Y \rangle = \{ x + y | x\in X, y\in Y\} for X,Y \subseteq \mathcal{V}.  The nice thing about f^\mathcal{P} is that it inherits interesting properties of f: if f is commutative, then so is f^\mathcal{P}, if ( \mathcal{V},f) is a semigroup, then (\mathcal{P}( \mathcal{V}), f^\mathcal{P}) is also a semigroup, if ( \mathcal{V},f) is a monoid, then (\mathcal{P}( \mathcal{V}), f^\mathcal{P}) is also a monoid, if ( \mathcal{V},f) is a group. then … well, never mind, we don’t need that anyway.

This means that all theorems about adding finite (indexed) collections of semigroup elements (and there are quite a couple in the Semigroup_ZF theory) can be reused for the operation on subsets of \mathcal{V} at little additional cost.

The setup for adding group subsets in the Gyula Lakos’s paper is different in that it assumes the existence of neutral element and defines how to add an infinite number of subsets of \mathcal{V}.

b.) More generally, suppose \{ A_\lambda \}_{\lambda \in \Lambda} is a countable indexed family of subsets of \mathcal{V}. Assume that 0 \in A_\lambda for all \lambda \in \Lambda except for finitely many. Only in that case we define the algebraic sum \sum_{\lambda \in \Lambda } A_\lambda as \{ \sum_{\lambda \in \Lambda } a_\lambda : a_\lambda \in A_\lambda , a_\lambda = 0 \text{ for all } \lambda \in \Lambda except for finitely many \}.

We can do something in that spirit for f^\mathcal{P} as well. Namely suppose that
(\mathcal{V}, f) is a monoid and A: \Lambda \rightarrow \mathcal{P}(\mathcal{V}) is a an indexed collection of subsets of \mathcal{V} such that all but finitely many contain the neutral element (denoted 0). We can split the index set  \Lambda into two subsets, one called \Lambda_0 consisting of those \lambda\in \Lambda for which A_\lambda contains the neutral element, and the rest. Then we can define the sum of the family \lambda \mapsto A_\lambda of subsets of \mathcal (V) as follows:

\sum_{\lambda \in \Lambda} A_\lambda := \left(\sum_{\lambda \in \Lambda \setminus \Lambda_0} A_\lambda\right) + \left(\bigcup_{F \in Fin\mathcal{P}(\Lambda_0)} \sum_{\lambda \in F} A_\lambda\right),

where Fin\mathcal{P}(\Lambda_0) is the set of finite nonempty subsets of \Lambda_0 and +, \sum are interpreted as the additive notation for f^\mathcal{P}. So what we do is we add all sets that do not contain 0, but for sets that do contain 0 we sum every finite subcollection and take the union of all sums obtained this way.

This nicely generalizes the concept of adding finite collections of sets of semigroups (where the \Lambda_0 is empty and there is only the first component of the sum above) and (in contrast to the Lakos’ approach) does not require selecting monoid elements from infinite collections of subsets of \mathcal{V}, i.e. does not require the axiom of choice.

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