The dual adjunction between MV-algebras and Tychonoff spaces (Q454391): Difference between revisions

This interesting and well-written paper is concerned with MV-algebras. These structures are the many-valued equivalents of Boolean algebras for classical, two-valued logic. They can be thought of as non-idempotent Boolean algebras. The most important example of an MV-algebra is the real interval \([0,1]\), where the negation of \(x\) is \(1-x\) and the sum of \(x\) and \(y\) is \(\min(1,x+y)\). The classical Stone duality between Boolean algebras and Stonean topological spaces can be extended to MV-algebras, but only partially. However, in analogy with algebraic geometry, the paper describes in detail a category-theoretic dual adjunction between the MV-algebras (seen as algebraic objects) and the subsets of the Cartesian powers of \([0,1]\) (seen as geometric objects). Like every adjunction, this one specializes to a dual equivalence between the fixpoints, which turn out to be the semisimple MV-algebras and the closed subsets of the powers of \([0,1]\). This gives an interesting Nullstellensatz for MV-algebras. Finally, when MV-algebras are finitely presented, the geometric counterpart is given by rational polyhedra (as the authors point out, the finitely presented case was already known, but the approach is original).