Paper detail

Reconstructing the topology of clones

Function clones are sets of functions on a fixed domain that are closed under composition and contain the projections. They carry a natural algebraic structure, provided by the laws of composition which hold in them, as well as a natural topological structure, provided by the topology of pointwise convergence, under which composition of functions becomes continuous. Inspired by recent results indicating the importance of the topological ego of function clones even for originally algebraic problems, we study questions of the following type: In which situations does the algebraic structure of a function clone determine its topological structure? We pay particular attention to function clones which contain an oligomorphic permutation group, and discuss applications of this situation in model theory and theoretical computer science.