Spaces Of Orderings And Abstract Real Spectra

This book is of interest to students as well as experts in the area of real algebraic geometry, quadratic forms, orderings, valuations, lattice ordered groups and rings, and in model theory. The original motivation comes from orderings on fields and commutative rings. This is explained as is the important application to minimal generation of semi-algebraic sets. Many results in the new theory of abstract real spectra (also called spaces of signs) appear here for the first time. The reader needs elementary knowledge of commutative rings, ordered fields and real closed fields and valuations.

Offers a comprehensive presentation of spectral spaces focussing on their topology and close connections with algebra, ordered structures, and logic.

Andrzej Mostowski was one of the leading 20th century logicians. This volume examines his legacy, devoted both to his scientific heritage and to the memory of him as a great researcher, teacher, organizer of science and person. It includes the bibliography of Mostowski's writings.

This book presents a systematic and unified report on the minimal description of constructible sets. It starts at a very basic level (almost undergraduate) and leads up to state-of-the-art results, many of which are published in book form for the very first time. The book contains numerous examples, 63 figures and each chapter ends with a section containing historical notes. The authors tried to keep the presentation as self-contained as it can possibly be.

This proceedings volume contains papers presented at the International Conference on the algebraic and arithmetic theory of quadratic forms held in Talca (Chile). The modern theory of quadratic forms has connections with a broad spectrum of mathematical areas including number theory, geometry, and K-theory. This volume contains survey and research articles covering the range of connections among these topics.

This volume contains 16 carefully refereed articles by participants in the Special Semester and the AMS Special Session on Real Algebraic Geometry and Ordered Structures held at Louisiana State University and Southern University (Baton Rouge). The 23 contributors to this volume were among the 75 mathematicians from 15 countries who participated in the special semester. Topics include the topology of real algebraic curves (Hilbert's 16th problem), moduli of real algebraic curves, effective sums of squares of real forms (Hilbert's 17th problem), efficient real quantifier elimination, subanalytic sets and stratifications, semialgebraic singularity theory, radial vector fields, exponential functions and valuations on nonarchimedean ordered fields, valued field extensions, partially ordered and lattice-ordered rings, rings of continuous functions, spectra of rings, and abstract spaces of (higher-level) orderings and real places. This volume provides a good overview of the state of the art in this area in the 1990s. It includes both expository and original research papers by top workers in this thriving field. The authors and editors strived to make the volume useful to a wide audience (including students and researchers) interested in real algebraic geometry and ordered structures-two subjects that are obviously related, but seldom brought together.

This monograph presents a systematic study of Special Groups, a first-order universal-existential axiomatization of the theory of quadratic forms, which comprises the usual theory over fields of characteristic different from 2, and is dual to the theory of abstract order spaces. The heart of our theory begins in Chapter 4 with the result that Boolean algebras have a natural structure of reduced special group. More deeply, every such group is canonically and functorially embedded in a certain Boolean algebra, its Boolean hull. This hull contains a wealth of information about the structure of the given special group, and much of the later work consists in unveiling it. Thus, in Chapter 7 we introduce two series of invariants "living" in the Boolean hull, which characterize the isometry of forms in any reduced special group. While the multiplicative series--expressed in terms of meet and symmetric difference--constitutes a Boolean version of the Stiefel-Whitney invariants, the additive series--expressed in terms of meet and join--, which we call Horn-Tarski invariants, does not have a known analog in the field case; however, the latter have a considerably more regular behaviour. We give explicit formulas connecting both series, and compute explicitly the invariants for Pfister forms and their linear combinations. In Chapter 9 we combine Boolean-theoretic methods with techniques from Galois cohomology and a result of Voevodsky to obtain an affirmative solution to a long standing conjecture of Marshall concerning quadratic forms over formally real Pythagorean fields. Boolean methods are put to work in Chapter 10 to obtain information about categories of special groups, reduced or not. And again in Chapter 11 to initiate the model-theoretic study of the first-order theory of reduced special groups, where, amongst other things we determine its model-companion. The first-order approach is also present in the study of some outstanding classes of morphisms carried out in Chapter 5, e.g., the pure embeddings of special groups. Chapter 6 is devoted to the study of special groups of continuous functions.

This monograph is a comprehensive exposition of the modern theory of valued and ordered fields. It presents the classical aspects of such fields: their arithmetic, topology, and Galois theory. Deeper cohomological aspects are studied in its last part in an elementary manner. This is done by means of the newly developed theory of generalized Milnor $K$-rings. The book emphasizes the close connections and interplay between valuations and orderings, and to a large extent, studies themin a unified manner. The presentation is almost entirely self-contained. In particular, the text develops the needed machinery of ordered abelian groups. This is then used throughout the text to replace the more classical techniques of commutative algebra. Likewise, the book provides an introductionto the Milnor $K$-theory. The reader is introduced to the valuation-theoretic techniques as used in modern Galois theory, especially in applications to birational anabelian geometry, where one needs to detect valuations from their ``cohomological footprints''. These powerful techniques are presented here for the first time in a unified and elementary way.