Dualizing clones into categories of topological spaces. (Q485103)

Clone theory (roughly the study of algebras of operations of various arities, closed under projections and (multi-)composition) is typically stated in the language of sets. Noting that much of the terminology of clone theory can be restated in a category theoretic language (such that when interpreted over the category of sets one recovers ordinary clone theory) the author makes a connection with Lawvere theories and prepares the stage for using category theoretic machinery, and in particular duality, for the benefit of clone theory. Sections 1 and 2 clearly explain the aim of the article and provide a brief introduction to the language of category theory and clone theory. Section 3 is a specialization of the general idea of doing clone theory via category theory and looks at clones of dual operations in the category of topological spaces. As the author stresses out, the topological requirements are very modest; connectedness is the prominent topological property used. The author studies the relationship between the lattice of clones of dual operations associated with a topological space \(X\) and connectedness properties of \(X\). The results in section 3 allow one to, among other things, relate connected components and upper bounds on essential arities. Section 4 studies in detail several consequences of the general results to classical clone theory, following a general recipe: given a duality theorem with some topological flavour (e.g., Stone duality, Gelfand duality, Priestley duality, etc.) certain clones can be dualized to give a clone of dual operations susceptible to examination using the results of section 3. The author obtains results concerning information on the number of idempotent elements in a commutative \(C^*\)-algebra, decompositions of bounded distributive lattices, and other results. The article, other than being very inviting and well-written, shows the usefulness of introducing category theoretic paradigms into clone theory, resulting in a unification of ideas.