Weakly Hausdorff spaces, and locally strongly sober spaces

Posted on November 20, 2022 by jgl

A funny convergence of topics happened a few weeks ago. Frédéric Mynard told me about so-called locally strongly sober spaces (which, I am ashamed to say, I had heard about but completely forgotten about). At the same time, I was interested in so-called weakly Hausdorff spaces, as defined by Klaus Keimel and Jimmie Lawson in their paper on measure extension theorems for T0 spaces. I realized that those two classes of spaces had a lot in common, and this led me to inquire whether that was a coincidence. As you may guess, this is not: we will see that the locally strongly sober spaces are exactly the weakly Hausdorff, coherent sober spaces. Read the full post.

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Strongly compact sets and the double hyperspace construction

Posted on October 19, 2022 by jgl

The notion of strongly compact set is due to Reinhold Heckmann. A few months ago, I said that I would explain why the sobrification of the space Qfin(X) of finitary compact sets on a sober space X is not the Smyth hyperspace Q(X), rather its subspace of strongly compact saturated sets Qs(X). This what I will start with. I will then present a funny other case where strongly compact sets are required. There is a long line of research purporting to show that, for certain spaces X, the Smyth and Hoare hyperspace constructions commute, namely that QHX and HQX are homeomorphic. The most complete such result is due to Matthew de Brecht and Tatsuji Kawai in 2019; they showed that this is the case exactly when X is consonant. I will give a simplified exposition of their proof, and I will show that essentially the same proof shows that QsHX and HQsX are homeomorphic, for every topological space whatsoever. Read the full post.

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Algebras of filter-related monads: II. KZ-monads

Posted on September 19, 2022 by jgl

Alan Day and Oswald Wyler once proved that the algebras of the filter monad on the category Top0 of T0 topological spaces are exactly the continuous (complete) lattices. Martín Escardó later gave a very interesting proof of this fact, using a category-theoretic construction due to Anders Kock which he calls KZ-monads. My purpose is to talk about Escardó’s argument; but mostly, really, to put forward his notion of KZ-monad, which is a true categorical gem. Read the full post.

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Algebras of filter-related monads: I. Ultrafilters and Manes’ theorem

Posted on August 20, 2022 by jgl

In 1969, Ernest Manes proved the following remarkable result: the algebras of the ultrafilter monad on Set are exactly the compact Hausdorff spaces. This is remarkable, because it gives a purely algebraic/category-theoretic of the otherwise purely topological notion of compact Hausdorff spaces. I will explain how this is proved, and I will give a few pointers to some extension results of the same kind. Read the full post.

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A report from ISDT’22: one-step closure; c-spaces are not CCC

Posted on July 20, 2022 by jgl

I have been attending the 9th International Symposium on Domain Theory (ISDT’22), which took place online, July 4-6, 2022, in Singapore. This was a fine conference indeed, and it ran very smoothly. I initially intended to give a summary of what happened there, but in the end I decided to concentrate on just two contributed papers: one by Hualin Miao, Qingguo Li, and Dongsheng Zhao, about those posets that have one-step closure, namely in which one can compute the Scott-closure of a downwards-closed subset A by just taking the collection of suprema of directed families included in A; the other one by Zhenchao Lyu, Xiaolin Xie, and Hui Kou, who showed that the category of c-spaces and the category of locally finitary compact spaces are not Cartesian-closed, by an argument that is both easy and clever. Read the full post.

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Q is not consonant: the Costantini-Watson argument

Posted on June 20, 2022 by jgl

I have already given an argument for the non-consonance of the Sorgenfrey line Rℓ here. I would now like to explain why the space Q of rational numbers is not consonant either. That is quite a challenge. The most easily accessible proof is due to Costantini and Watson, but it still requires some effort to understand. Fortunately, the topological game of last time will help us make sense of at least one half of the construction. Read the full post.

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Compact scattered subsets and a topological game

Posted on May 20, 2022 by jgl

Showing that Q is not consonant is quite an ordeal. I have finally managed to understand one of the existing proofs of this fact, due to Costantini and Watson. This would be a bit too long to cover entirely in one post, so the bulk of the explanation will be for another time. Instead, I will explain why the compact subsets of Q are all scattered, and what it means, but the important point of this month’s post is that, reading between the lines, the Costantini-Watson argument relies on a property that I will characterize through the use of a topological game G(K), resembling the strong Choquet game, in which we will see that player I has a winning strategy if K is compact and scattered—and that is an if and only if in any T2 space. Read the full post.

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Topological lattices with small semilattices

Posted on April 19, 2022 by jgl

I would like to explain a clever counterexample due to Jimmie Lawson in 1970, or rather a slight variant of it, pertaining to the theory of topological semilattices and to a property that crops up naturally, namely having small semilattices. Before I can do this, I will have to spend some time explaining what topological semilattices are, and how small semilattices arise naturally. For motivational purposes, I will consider the problem of characterizing the algebras of the so-called finitary Smyth hyperspace monad, a question that Andrea Schalk has solved, among others, in her 1993 PhD thesis. Read the full post.

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When do the upper (a.k.a., lower Vietoris) and Scott topologies coincide on the Hoare hyperspace of a space?

Posted on March 20, 2022 by jgl

I would like to talk about a nifty, recent result due to Yu Chen, Hui Kou, and Zhenchao Lyu. There are two natural topologies on the Hoare hyperspace of a space X, the Scott and the lower Vietoris topology, and one may wonder when they coincide. Outside of the realm of posets in their Scott topology, we will see that they rather rarely coincide. The result that is the core of this month’s post is that they do if X is a poset (with its Scott topology) satisfying what I will call the Chen-Kou-Lyu property; and that this property holds if the poset X is core-compact, or first-countable. Read the full post.

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L-domains, stable open sets, and stable Stone duality

Posted on February 21, 2022 by jgl

Stone duality relates topological spaces and locales (or frames). But there are really many sorts of Stone dualities. In 1997, Yixiang Chen studied Stone dualities that relate so-called L-domains to so-called distributive D-semilattices. This was refined later in a common paper with Achim Jung. This is a very nice theory, which looks a lot like ordinary Stone duality between topological spaces and frames, but with a few twists. As we will see, the resulting monad, which I would like to call algebraicization, turns every L-domain into an algebraic L-domain. Read the full post.

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