At the beginning of my Ph.D. studies, I had the intuition that Grothendieck toposes could serve as sorts of 'bridges' for effectively transferring information between distinct mathematical theories.
The results obtained in my Ph.D. thesis "The Duality between Grothendieck Toposes and Geometric Theories" actually provided compelling technical evidence for the validity of such a view, in the form of non-trivial applications pertaining to different fields of Mathematics, and stimulated new developments of the original idea, which eventually led to the general methodologies described in the programmatic paper "The unification of Mathematics via Topos Theory".
The principles introduced in this work are abstract and transversal to various mathematical fields, and the application of them can lead to surprising and non-trivial results in several areas of Mathematics; in fact, these methods have already generated ramifications into distinct branches including Algebra, Topology, Algebraic Geometry, Functional Analysis, Model Theory and Proof Theory, and the potential of this theory has just started to be explored.
My technical contributions, arising from an implementation of this philosophy in a variety of different mathematical contexts, can be described as follows.
My Ph.D thesis has addressed the long-standing problem of understanding the nature of the relatioship between Grothendieck toposes and geometric theories given by the theory of classifying toposes. The dissertation contains several new theorems on the relationship between geometric theories and their classifying toposes, in the form of criteria characterizing the geometric theories classified by relevant classes of toposes, but, most importantly, provides results and methods which justify the view of classifying toposes as 'bridges' mentioned above.
My Ph.D. work resulted in a series of eight papers, which contain theoretical results as well as 'concrete' applications of the philosophy 'toposes as bridges' in a variety of different mathematical contexts.
I provide a brief description of the contents of these
papers as
well as
of the later ones below.
In
the
paper
"Yoneda representations
of flat functors and classifying toposes"
I established a
fundamental
connection between topos theory and model theory leading to a number of
new developments and applications. The main result of this paper is an
explicit model-theoretic description of the theory classified by a given
topos of sheaves on a site in terms of the models of the theory
classified by the corresponding presheaf topos.
In the paper
"Fraïssé's
construction from a topos-theoretic perspective"
I produced a topos-theoretic interpretation of Fraïssé’s construction in
model theory, leading to new results in logic, in particular on
countably categorical theories. Specifically, the three concepts
involved in Fraisse’s constructions are seen to correspond precisely to
three different ways for looking at the same classifying topos according
to the philosophy
'toposes as bridges'.
In the paper
"De
Morgan classifying toposes"
I introduced a general method for deciding whether a Grothendieck topos
satisfies De Morgan’s law (resp. the law of excluded middle) or not,
with various applications to the theory of classifying toposes. In
particular, I provided complete characterizations of the classes of
theories classified by a De Morgan (resp. a Boolean) topos and
introduced the notions of Booleanization and DeMorganization of a
geometric theory. In this context I also exhibited equivalences of
well-known logical notions (those of De Morgan and Boolean algebra) with
topological ones.
In my paper with Peter Johnstone
"De
Morgan’s law and the theory of fields"
we provided applications in algebra of a new notion (that of
DeMorganization of a topos) introduced by myself in the paper
"De
Morgan classifying toposes";
specifically, we have shown that the DeMorganization of the classifying
topos for the theory of fields classifies the theory of fields of
nonzero characteristic which are algebraic over their prime fields.
In
the
paper
"Atomic toposes and
countable categoricity"
I established several results on atomic
toposes and gave
a model-theoretic characterization of the class of geometric theories
classified by an atomic topos having enough points; in particular, I
showed that every complete geometric theory classified by an atomic
topos is countably categorical.
The central result of the paper "Lattices of theories" is a duality theorem providing a central connection between geometric logic and the theory of Grothendieck toposes and paving the way for a transfer of ideas and results from the theories of elementary and Grothendieck toposes to logic. Specifically, the theorem provides, for any geometric theory, a bijection between the subtoposes of its classifying topos and the geometric extensions of the theory (considered up to a natural notion of syntactic equivalence). The paper gives two different proofs of the theorem and investigates the logical counterparts of many constructions and results in elementary topos theory which apply to subtoposes; the resulting notions are seen to be of natural logical and mathematical interest and several applications of the general theory are given. The results of this paper have also led to a solution to the third of the "Open problems in Topos Theory" by F. W. Lawvere.
The paper
"Universal
models and definability"
consists in a systematic investigation of universal models in Topos
Theory
with a particular emphasis on their applications to definability by
geometric formulae and to the investigation of the law of excluded
middle and De Morgan’s law on Grothendieck toposes.
The paper "Syntactic characterizations of properties of classifying toposes" provides characterizations, for various fragments of geometric logic, of the class of theories classified by a locally connected (respectively connected and locally connected, atomic, compact, presheaf) topos, and exploited the existence of multiple sites of definition for a given topos to establish various results on quotients of theories of presheaf type.
In
the
paper
"A
characterization theorem for geometric logic",
I gave a semantic characterization of the classes of structures arising
as the classes of models of a geometric theory inside Grothendieck
toposes, solving in particular a twenty-year old problem of Ieke
Moerdijk.
The paper
"The
unification of Mathematics via Topos Theory"
is
a sort of
'scientific
manifesto'
of my research programme, in which I advocate that Grothendieck toposes
can serve as unifying spaces being able to act as
'bridges'
for effectively transferring knowledge between distinct mathematical
theories. A general overview
The
paper "A topos-theoretic
approach to Stone-type dualities"
provides
a general topos-theoretic perspective on Stone-type dualities.
The theory described in this paper arises from a faithful implementation
of the philosophy ‘toposes as bridges’, and
consists in
a general framework for analyzing the known Stone-type dualities, as
well as for introducing new ones: several known dualities are seen to be
specializations of just one topos-theoretic phenomenon, and new
dualities and equivalences between categories of preorders and
categories of posets,
locales or topological spaces are established. The paper also contains a
variety of other applications of the philosophy ‘toposes as bridges’ in
Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, Topology and Logic.
In the paper "A general method for building reflections" we introduce a general technique for generating reflections between categories. The method can be profitably applied to generate adjunctions starting from geometric morphisms between Grothendieck toposes; as particular cases, we recover various well-known Stone-type adjunctions and establish several new ones.
The paper "Priestley-type dualities for partially ordered structures" provides a general framework for generating dualities between categories of partial orders and categories of ordered Stone spaces; the classical Priestley duality for distributive lattices is recovered as a particular case and several other dualities for different kinds of partially ordered structures are established.
In the paper "Gelfand spectra and Wallman compactifications" we carry out a systematic, topos-theoretically inspired, investigation of Wallman compactifications with a particular emphasis on their relations with Gelfand spectra and Stone-Cech compactifications. In addition to proving several specific results about Wallman bases and maximal spectra of distributive lattices, we establish a general framework for functorializing the representation of a topological space as the maximal spectrum of a Wallman base for it, which allows to generate different dualities between categories of topological spaces and subcategories of the category of distributive lattices; in particular, this leads to a categorical equivalence between the category of commutative C*-algebras and a natural category of distributive lattices. We also establish a general theorem concerning the representation of the Stone-Cech compactification of a locale as a Wallman compactification, which subsumes all the previous results obtained on this problem.
In the paper "Topologies for intermediate logics" we investigate the problem of characterizing the classes of Grothendieck toposes whose internal logic satisfies a given assertion in the theory of Heyting algebras, and introduce natural analogues of the double negation and De Morgan topologies on an elementary topos for a wide class of intermediate logics.
In the paper “Topological Galois Theory” we introduce an abstract topos-theoretic framework for building Galois-type theories in a variety of different mathematical contexts; such theories are obtained from representations of certain atomic two-valued toposes as toposes of continuous actions of a topological group. Our framework subsumes in particular Grothendieck's Galois theory and allows to build Galois-type equivalences in new contexts, such as for example graph theory and finite group theory.
A
research project based on the technique
'toposes as bridges'
has recently been funded by the European Commission in the
form of a Marie Curie Fellowship enabling Dr. Marco Benini
(University of Insubria) to spend one and a half year working on the
project at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Dr.
Peter Schuster.
The Mathematical Logic group of the University of Padua has recently obtained funding for a post-doctoral project investigating, amongst other things, aspects of my work relevant for formal topology.
Laurent Lafforgue has advocated in this document the importance of investigating the technique 'toposes as bridges' in connection to the Langlands programme.