Preserving near unanimity terms under products (Q331032)

The paper examines how the minimum arities of near unanimity operations change when one takes a Mal'tsev product or join of two (idempotent) varieties with near unanimity operations. The main result of the paper is that if \(V_0\) and \(V_1\) are idempotent varieties that have near unanimity operations of arities \(m\) and \(n\), respectively, then the Mal'tsev product \(V_0\circ V_1\) (and therefore also the join \(V_0\vee V_1\)) has a near unanimity operation of arity \(m+n-1\). Moreover, this lower bound on arity of near unanimity operations turns out to be tight: The paper shows how to find, for each \(m,n>2\), two idempotent varieties with near unanimity operations of arities \(n\) and \(m\) so that both the join (and therefore also the Mal'tsev product) of these varieties has no near unanimity operation of arity \(m+n-2\) or less.