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Binary relational structures having only countably many nonisomorphic substructures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Dugald Macpherson
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London EI 4NS, England
James H. Schmerl
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269

Extract

For a structure let φ() be the number of nonisomorphic, countably infinite substructures of . The problem considered here, suggested by M. Pouzet, is that of characterizing those countable for which φ() ≤ ℵ0. In this paper we will deal exclusively with structures in a finite, binary relational language L. The characterization of those L-structures for which φ() ≤ ℵ0 (which turns out to be equivalent to ) is given in Theorem 3. It is the culmination of a three-step process. The first step, resulting in Theorem 1, shows that for a countable stable L-structure , φ() ≤ ℵ0 iff is cellular. (See Definition 0.1.) In the second step we consider linearly ordered sets = (A, ≤ ℵ0), and characterize in Theorem 2 the order types of those for which φ() ≤ ℵ0. Finally, in Theorem 3, we amalgamate Theorems 1 and 2 to get the classification of all countable L-structures for which φ() ≤ ℵ0.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1991

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References

REFERENCES

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