Universal Algebra

Second Edition
George Grätzer

Universal Algebra
Second Edition
George Grätzer
Department of Mathematics
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2
Canada
gratzer@ms.umanitoba.ca

ISBN: 978-0-387-77486-2 e-ISBN: 978-0-387-77487-9

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-77487-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008922052

Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 08-01, 08-02

© 2008, Second Edition with updates, 1979 Second Edition, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Originally published in the University Series in Higher Mathematics (D. Van Nostrand Company);
edited by M. H. Stone, L. Nirenberg, and S. S. Chern, 1968

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I met the young man of about twenty-eight at the Polo Park shopping mall
in Winnipeg.1 He walked much faster than I, so I was looking at his back
as he passed by. He looked very familiar. Rather thin, with a lot of brown
hair, obviously in a hurry. I caught up with him when he paused in front of a
shop window. He turned around half-way; he immediately knew who I was.
I cannot say that he was happy to see me.
“I did not do so badly,” I stammered.
“Really,” he responded. “Just compare.
When I wrote Universal Algebra, I knew it
all. Remember? At Penn State, we spent three
weeks in the seminar to decide not to include
an article in the book. I knew most everything
that was published. Can you say the same?”
“No, I cannot,” I replied.
“And remember your undertaking: Even
though you started on General Lattice The-
ory after completing Universal Algebra, you
resolved to keep your work evenly balanced
between the two fields,” he called me to account.
“True, but the numbers were against me.
Since I finished Universal Algebra in 1966,
more than 5,000 papers were published in this
field and over 13,000 in lattice theory. I would
have had to average two papers a day (includ-
ing more than a hundred books!), just to keep
up,” I replied.
The young man was mad at me, and with
good reason. For about ten years after I fin-
ished Universal Algebra, I concentrated on
lattices. There was so much to do. You cannot
write a book on lattices without free products
and uniquely complemented lattices, and so
much else. And so little was known. . . . In-
deed, fewer than 20% of my papers after 1966 were written on universal
algebraic topics and most of them were written before 1980.
***
1
After F. Karinthy, Atheneum, 1913.
584 EPILOGUE

A lot has happened in Universal Algebra in forty years. I cannot attempt

here to survey the 5,000 papers and dozens of books. But I would like to point
out that many of the important papers in these forty years are in—or utilize
the results of—five main developments.
1. Theory of quasivarieties. The oldest of these five fields is the theory of
quasivarieties started by A. I. Maltsev but seriously explored by V. Gorbunov,
his students, and colleagues in Siberia. More recently, some East European
and some American mathematicians have also made important contributions.
A part of this theory was covered in the book V. A. Gorbunov, Algebraic the-
ory of quasivarieties.2 In fact, he considers universal Horn classes, which
include quasivarieties and anti-varieties. Thus, the results apply to a wide va-
riety of algebraic systems that may have relational symbols in their language:
graphs, ordered structures, some geometrical models, formal languages, and
others. Gorbunov’s book contains more than 300 references.
The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem has been one of the main driving forces
in this field for the last 25 years. It asks for a characterization of lattices
that can be represented as the lattice of all subquasivarieties of a quasivariety.
The problem is still open even for finite lattices.
A very thorough coverage of this field was published in a special double
issue of Studia Logica 78 (2004). A survey article by M. E. Adams, K. V.
Adaricheva, W. Dziobiak, and A. V. Kravchenko and eighteen research arti-
cles in almost 400 pages survey the various aspects of the field, including a
listing of open problems.
2. Commutator theory. Originally introduced by J. D. H. Smith for per-
mutable varieties in 1976 and extended to modular varieties by C. Herrmann
and J. Hagemann in 1979, commutators were fully developed in the book,
Commutator theory for congruence modular varieties by R. Freese and R. N.
McKenzie.3 This book shows that a natural commutator operation can be
defined on the congruence lattice of an algebra in a variety with modular con-
gruence lattices.
As S. Oates-Williams wrote: “It is quite remarkable that anything resem-
bling a commutator can be defined in a general algebra; that it should have
such nice properties when restricted to algebras lying in a congruence modu-
lar variety is almost too much to expect.”
Freese and McKenzie develop the theory and use it to prove deep results.
For example, the subdirectly irreducible algebras in a finitely generated con-
gruence modular variety either have a finite bound on their cardinality or no
cardinal bound at all. Their concepts and results found many applications in
later papers.
2
Translated from the Russian. Siberian School of Algebra and Logic. Consultants Bureau,
New York, 1998.
3
London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, 125. Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 1987.
 EPILOGUE 585

3. Tame congruence theory. Apart from a paper of P. P. Pálfy, this theory—

like Athena, born fully grown from the forehead of Zeus—burst onto the
scene fully developed in D. Hobby and R. McKenzie, The structure of finite
algebras.4 An excellent write up of this book, is J. Berman’s review in the
Mathematical Reviews. Three important papers by McKenzie motivated by
tame congruence theory to obtain deep results are also jointly reviewed by
J. Berman.5 They include the solution, in the negative, of A. Tarski’s famous
problem from the early 1960’s: Does there exist an algorithm which, when
given an effective description of a finite algebra A, determines whether or not
A has a finite basis for its equational theory?
Tame congruence theory has been effectively applied in a large number of
papers to solve various problems related to finite algebras and locally finite
varieties.
4. The shape of congruence lattices. The forthcoming book by K. A. Kearnes
and E. W. Kiss presents a beautiful theory. Here is one example: The congru-
ence lattices of a variety V satisfy SD∨ iff they satisfy SD∧ and V satisfies
a nontrivial congruence identity. In particular, SD∧ and SD∨ are equiva-
lent for varieties satisfying a nontrivial congruence identity. This was known
for locally finite varieties (using tame congruence theory) but that is far more
restrictive than the full result.
5. Natural duality theory. The foundations of this theory were laid in
1980 by B. A. Davey and H. Werner. They showed that there is a common
universal-algebraic framework for various classical topological dualities, in-
cluding the dualities for abelian groups (L. S. Pontryagin, 1934), Boolean
algebras (M. H. Stone, 1936), and distributive lattices (H. A. Priestley, 1970).
They developed methods for finding many topological dualities, in addition
to the classical ones. For example, if a finite algebra has a near-unanimity
term—and in particular, if it is lattice-based—then there is a natural duality
for the quasivariety it generates.
The book by D. M. Clark and B. A. Davey, Natural dualities for the work-
ing algebraist6 covers the first eighteen years of the theory of natural dualities.
More recent results, including work on full dualities and strong dualities, is
covered in the book by J. G. Pitkethly and B. A. Davey, Dualisability: unary
algebras and beyond.7
***
And what has happened with the problems I proposed? In Appendix 2,
I report on (partial) solutions to a large number of problems. I would say that
roughly half of the problems remain unresolved. For instance, the problem:
4
Contemporary Mathematics. 76. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1988.
5
MR1371732-4 (97e:08002a-c)
6Studies in Advanced Mathematics. 57. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
7Advances in Mathematics. 9. Springer, New York, 2005.
586 EPILOGUE

Is every finite lattice the congruence lattice of a finite algebra?

now seems very difficult, because a positive solution to the “much easier prob-
lem” to embed every finite lattice into a finite partition lattice turned out to be
discouragingly hard.
Some problems shifted in focus. In 1979, it seemed likely that every dis-
tributive algebraic lattice could be represented as the congruence lattice of a
lattice. Now that F. Wehrung has provided a counterexample, we ask:
1. Can every distributive algebraic lattice can be represented as the congru-
ence lattice of an algebra in a congruence distributive variety?
or even stronger:
2. Is there a congruence distributive variety V such that every distributive
algebraic lattice can be represented as the congruence lattice of an algebra
in V?
***
So what does the excited young man say in this book that is still relevant
after all these profound developments? A lot, I think. A vast superstructure
has been built up, but the foundation is still basically the same. Despite the
numerous books on specialized topics—such as the few mentioned above—
it may still be the best introduction to Universal Algebra to learn the basic
concepts as presented here and to work out some of the 750 exercises. Then
one could proceed to the specialized books. This is a good way to get started.
And remember, these specialized topics are all interconnected. Even if you
cannot become a researcher in them all, you must have a passing knowledge
of all five fields to become successful. Maybe, I am prejudiced. But if I were
a young man, this is how I would proceed.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank K. Adaricheva, J. Berman,
G. M. Bergman, B. Davey, R. Freese, K. A. Kearnes, R. N. McKenzie, J. B.
Nation, W. Taylor, and F. Wehrung for their help and encouragement.