Title
Difference hierarchies and duality with an application to formal languages
Abstract
The notion of a difference hierarchy, first introduced by Hausdorff, plays an important role in many areas of mathematics, logic and theoretical computer science such as descriptive set theory, complexity theory, and the theory of regular languages and automata. Lattice theoretically, the difference hierarchy over a distributive lattice stratifies the Boolean algebra generated by it according to the minimum length of difference chains required to describe the Boolean elements. While each Boolean element is given by a finite difference chain, there is no canonical such writing in general. We show that, relative to the filter completion, or equivalently, the lattice of closed upsets of the dual Priestley space, each Boolean element over the lattice has a canonical minimum length decomposition into a Hausdorff difference chain. As a corollary, each Boolean element over a co-Heyting algebra has a canonical difference chain (and an order dual result holds for Heyting algebras). With a further generalization of this result involving a directed family of closure operators on a Boolean algebra, we give an elementary proof of the fact that if a regular language is given by a Boolean combination of universal sentences using arbitrary numerical predicates then it is also given by a Boolean combination of universal sentences using only regular numerical predicates.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.topol.2019.106975
Topology and its Applications
Keywords
DocType
Volume
06D50,68F05
Journal
273
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0166-8641
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Célia Borlido100.34
Mai Gehrke234949.19
Andreas Krebs3218.20
Howard Straubing452860.92