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Congruence Preservation, Lattices and Recognizability

Looking at some monoids and (semi)rings (natural numbers, integers and p-adic integers), and more generally, residually finite algebras (in a strong sense), we prove the equivalence of two ways for a function on such an algebra to behave like the operations of the algebra. The first way is to preserve congruences or stable preorders. The second way is to demand that preimages of recognizable sets belong to the lattice or the Boolean algebra generated by the preimages of recognizable sets by derived unary operation of the algebra (such as translations, quotients,. . . ).