On relations
The paper deals with the characterization of ordered sets by means of ternary semigroups of homomorphisms of ordered sets.
Let (C,R) be the countable dense circular ordering, and G its automorphism group. It is shown that certain properties of group elements are first order definable in G, and these results are used to reconstruct C inside G, and to demonstrate that its outer automorphism group has order 2. Similar statements hold for the completion C̅.
We use categories to recast the combinatorial theory of full heaps, which are certain labelled partially ordered sets that we introduced in previous work. This gives rise to a far simpler set of definitions, which we use to outline a combinatorial construction of the so-called loop algebras associated to affine untwisted Kac--Moody algebras. The finite convex subsets of full heaps are equipped with a statistic called parity, and this naturally gives rise to Kac's asymmetry function. The latter is...