The clone of a topological space is known to have a strictly more expressive first-order language than that of the monoid of continuous self-maps. The current paper studies coclones of topological spaces (i.e. clones in the category dual to that of topological spaces and continuous maps) and proves that, in contrast to clones, the first-order properties of coclones cannot express anything more than those of the monoid, except for the case of discrete and indiscrete spaces.

Quasigroups were originally described combinatorially, in terms of existence and uniqueness conditions on the solutions to certain equations. Evans introduced a universal-algebraic characterization, as algebras with three binary operations satisfying four identities. Now, quasigroups are redefined as heterogeneous algebras, satisfying just two conditions respectively known as hypercommutativity and hypercancellativity.