We study the succinctness of monadic second-order logic and a variety of monadic fixed point logics on trees. All these languages are known to have the same expressive power on trees, but some can express the same queries much more succinctly than others. For example, we show that, under some complexity theoretic assumption, monadic second-order logic is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic least fixed point logic, which in turn is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic datalog. Succinctness...

We study the succinctness of monadic second-order logic and a variety of monadic fixed point logics on trees. All these languages are known to have the same expressive power on trees, but some can express the same queries much more succinctly than others. For example, we show that, under some complexity theoretic assumption, monadic second-order logic is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic least fixed point logic, which in turn is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic datalog.
Succinctness...

We give a new proof of the fact that finite bipartite graphs cannot be axiomatized by finitely many first-order sentences among finite graphs. (This fact is a consequence of a general theorem proved by L. Ham and M. Jackson, and the counterpart of this fact for all bipartite graphs in the class of all graphs is a well-known consequence of the compactness theorem.) Also, to exemplify that our method is applicable in various fields of mathematics, we prove that neither finite simple groups, nor the...