Ramsey Properties of Products and Pullbacks of Categories and the Grothendieck Construction

This article is concerned with classes of relational structures that are closed under taking substructures and isomorphism, that have the joint embedding property, and that furthermore have the Ramsey property, a strong combinatorial property which resembles the statement of Ramsey's classic theorem. Such classes of structures have been called Ramsey classes. Nesetril and Roedl showed that they have the amalgamation property, and therefore each such class has a homogeneous Fraisse-limit. Ramsey classes have recently attracted attention due to a surprising link with the notion of extreme amenability from topological dynamics. Other applications of Ramsey classes include reduct classification of homogeneous structures. We give a survey of the various fundamental Ramsey classes and their (often tricky) combinatorial proofs, and about various methods to derive new Ramsey classes from known Ramsey classes. Finally, we state open problems related to a potential classification of Ramsey classes.

Directed graphs and boron trees

We show that every free amalgamation class of finite structures with relations and (symmetric) partial functions is a Ramsey class when enriched by a free linear ordering of vertices. This is a common strengthening of the Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il-R\"odl Theorem and the second and third authors' Ramsey theorem for finite models (that is, structures with both relations and functions). We also find subclasses with the ordering property. For languages with relational symbols and unary functions we also show the extension property for partial automorphisms (EPPA) of free amalgamation classes. These general results solve several conjectures and provide an easy Ramseyness test for many classes of structures.

Pre-adjunctions and the Ramsey property

We prove the Ramsey property for classes of ordered structures with closures and given local properties. This generalises earlier results: the Nešetřil–Rödl Theorem, the Ramsey property of partial orders and metric spaces as well as the authors' Ramsey lift of bowtie-free graphs. We use this framework to solve several open problems and give new examples of Ramsey classes. Among others, we find Ramsey lifts of convexly ordered S-metric spaces and prove the Ramsey theorem for finite models (i.e. structures with both functions and relations) thus providing the ultimate generalisation of the structural Ramsey theorem. Both of these results are natural, and easy to state, yet their proofs involve most of the theory developed here.We also characterise Ramsey lifts of classes of structures defined by finitely many forbidden homomorphisms and extend this to special cases of classes with closures. This has numerous applications. For example, we find Ramsey lifts of many Cherlin–Shelah–Shi classes.

Dual Ramsey properties for classes of algebras

The class of finite distributive lattices, as many other classes of structures, does not have the Ramsey property. It is quite common, though, that after expanding the structures with appropriately chosen linear orders the resulting class has the Ramsey property. So, one might expect that a similar result holds for the class of all finite distributive lattices. Surprisingly, Kechris and Sokic have proved in 2012 that this is not the case: no expansion of the class of finite distributive lattices by linear orders satisfies the Ramsey property. In this paper we prove that the variety of distributive lattices is not an exception, but an instance of a more general phenomenon. We show that for almost all nontrivial locally finite varieties of lattices no “reasonable” expansion of the finite members of the variety by linear orders gives rise to a Ramsey class. The responsibility for this lies not with the lattices as structures, but with the lack of algebraic morphisms: if we consider lattices as partially ordered sets (and thus switch from algebraic embeddings to embeddings of relational structures) we show that every variety of lattices gives rise to a class of linearly ordered posets having both the Ramsey property and the ordering property. It now comes as no surprise that the same is true for varieties of semilattices.

Let A \mathbf {A} be a finite structure. We say that a finite structure B \mathbf {B} is an extension property for partial automorphisms (EPPA)-witness for A \mathbf {A} if it contains A \mathbf {A} as a substructure and every isomorphism of substructures of A \mathbf {A} extends to an automorphism of B \mathbf {B} . Class C \mathcal C of finite structures has the EPPA (also called the Hrushovski property) if it contains an EPPA-witness for every structure in C \mathcal C . We develop a systematic framework for combinatorial constructions of EPPA-witnesses satisfying additional local properties and thus for proving EPPA for a given class C \mathcal C . Our constructions are elementary, self-contained and lead to a common strengthening of the Herwig–Lascar theorem on EPPA for relational classes defined by forbidden homomorphisms, the Hodkinson–Otto theorem on EPPA for relational free amalgamation classes, its strengthening for unary functions by Evans, Hubička and Nešetřil and their coherent variants by Siniora and Solecki. We also prove an EPPA analogue of the main results of J. Hubička and J. Nešetřil: All those Ramsey classes (Ramsey classes with closures and forbidden homomorphisms), thereby establishing a common framework for proving EPPA and the Ramsey property. There are numerous applications of our results, we include a solution of a problem related to a class constructed by the Hrushovski predimension construction. We also characterize free amalgamation classes of finite Γ L \Gamma \!_L -structures with relations and unary functions which have EPPA.

A Ramsey theorem for multiposets

For a fixed infinite structure $\Gamma$ with finite signature tau, we study the following computational problem: input are quantifier-free first-order tau-formulas phi_0,phi_1,...,phi_n that define relations R_0,R_1,\dots,R_n over Gamma. The question is whether the relation R_0 is primitive positive definable from R_1,...,R_n, i.e., definable by a first-order formula that uses only relation symbols for R_1, ..., R_n, equality, conjunctions, and existential quantification (disjunction, negation, and universal quantification are forbidden).We show decidability of this problem for all structures Gamma that have a first-order definition in an ordered homogeneous structure Delta with a finite language whose age is a Ramsey class and determined by finitely many forbidden substructures. Examples for structures Gamma with this property are the order of the rationals, the random graph, the homogeneous universal poset, the random tournament, all homogeneous universal C-relations, and many more. We also obtain decidability of the problem when we replace primitive positive definability by existential positive, or existential definability. Our proof makes use of universal algebraic and model theoretic concepts, Ramsey theory, and a recent characterization of Ramsey classes in topological dynamics.

For a fixed countably infinite structure Γ with finite relational signature τ, we study the following computational problem: input are quantifier-free τ-formulas ϕ0, ϕ1, …, ϕn that define relations R0, R1, …, Rn over Γ. The question is whether the relation R0 is primitive positive definable from R1, …, Rn, i.e., definable by a first-order formula that uses only relation symbols for R1, …, Rn, equality, conjunctions, and existential quantification (disjunction, negation, and universal quantification are forbidden).We show decidability of this problem for all structures Γ that have a first-order definition in an ordered homogeneous structure Δ with a finite relational signature whose age is a Ramsey class and determined by finitely many forbidden substructures. Examples of structures Γ with this property are the order of the rationals, the random graph, the homogeneous universal poset, the random tournament, all homogeneous universal C-relations, and many more. We also obtain decidability of the problem when we replace primitive positive definability by existential positive, or existential definability. Our proof makes use of universal algebraic and model theoretic concepts, Ramsey theory, and a recent characterization of Ramsey classes in topological dynamics.

In this paper, we prove the existence of small and big Ramsey degrees of classes of finite unary algebras in an arbitrary (not necessarily finite) algebraic language Ω. Our results generalize some Ramsey-type results of M. Sokić concerning finite unary algebras over finite languages. To do so, we develop a completely new strategy that relies on the fact that right adjoints preserve the Ramsey property. We then treat unary algebras as Eilenberg-Moore coalgebras for a functor with comultiplication, and using pre-adjunctions transport the Ramsey properties, we are interested in from the category of finite or countably infinite chains of order type ω. Moreover, we show that finite objects have finite big Ramsey degrees in the corresponding cofree structures over countably many generators.

We introduce the class COU S of finite ultrametric spaces with distances in the set S and with two additional linear orderings. We also introduce the class EOP of finite posets with two additional linear orderings. In this paper, we prove that COU S and EOP are Ramsey classes. In addition, we give an application of our results to calculus of universal minimal flows.

formula omitted]-Ramsey classes of graphs

Big Ramsey degrees in ultraproducts of finite structures