IRREDUCIBLE QUASIORDERS OF MONOUNARY ALGEBRAS

Abstract

AbstractRooted monounary algebras can be considered as an algebraic counterpart of directed rooted trees. We work towards a characterization of the lattice of compatible quasiorders by describing its join- and meet-irreducible elements. We introduce the limit $\cB _\infty $ of all $d$-dimensional Boolean cubes $\Two ^d$ as a monounary algebra; then the natural order on $\Two ^d$ is meet-irreducible. Our main result is that any completely meet-irreducible quasiorder of a rooted algebra is a homomorphic preimage of the natural partial order (or its inverse) of a suitable subalgebra of $\cB _\infty $. For a partial order, it is known that complete meet-irreducibility means that the corresponding partially ordered structure is subdirectly irreducible. For a rooted monounary algebra it is shown that this property implies that the unary operation has finitely many nontrivial kernel classes and its graph is a binary tree.