Facteurs et plans. I : Structure de finesse
We propose the notion of flocks, which formerly were introduced only in based algebras, for any universal algebra. This generalization keeps the main properties we know from vector spaces, e.g. a closure system that extends the subalgebra one. It comes from the idempotent elementary functions, we call "interpolators", that in case of vector spaces merely are linear functions with normalized coefficients. The main example, we consider outside vector spaces, concerns Boolean algebras,...
The present paper addresses the problem of attainment of the supremums in various equivalent definitions of the hereditary density hd and hereditary Lindelöf degree hL of Boolean algebras. We partially answer two problems of J. Donald Monk [13, Problems 50, 54], showing consistency of different attainment behaviour and proving that (for the variants considered) this is the best result we can expect.