This paper formalises within first-order logic some common practices in computer science to do with representing and reasoning about syntactical structures involving named bound variables (as opposed to nameless terms, explicit substitutions, or higher order abstract syntax). It introduces Nominal Logic, a version of first-order many-sorted logic with equality containing primitives for renaming via name-swapping and for freshness of names, from which a notion of binding can be derived. Its axioms express...

This is the third in a series of papers on algebraic set theory, the aim of which is to develop a categorical semantics for constructive set theories, including predicative ones, based on the notion of a “predicative category with small maps”. 1 In the first paper in this series [8] we discussed how these predicative categories

Abstract. We present a solution to the problem of defining a counterpart in Algebraic Set Theory of the construction of internal sheaves in Topos Theory. Our approach is general in that we consider sheaves as determined by Lawvere-Tierney coverages, rather than by Grothendieck coverages, and assume only a weakening of the axioms for small maps originally introduced by Joyal and Moerdijk, thus subsuming the existing topos-theoretic results.

Abstract. We present a solution to the problem of defining a counterpart in Algebraic Set Theory of the construction of internal sheaves in Topos Theory. Our approach is general in that we consider sheaves as determined by Lawvere-Tierney coverages, rather than by Grothendieck coverages, and assume only a weakening of the axioms for small maps originally introduced by Joyal and Moerdijk, thus subsuming the existing topos-theoretic results.

Motivated by a model for syntactic control of interference, we introduce a general categorical concept of bireflectivity. Bireflective subcategories of a category A are subcategories with left and right adjoint equal, subject to a coherence condition. We characterize them in terms of split-idempotent natural transformations on id A . In the special case that A is a presheaf category, we characterize them in terms of the domain, and prove that any bireflective subcategory of A is itself a presheaf category. We define diagonal structure on a symmetric monoidal category which is still more general than asking the tensor product to be the categorical product. We then obtain a bireflective subcategory of [C op ; Set] and deduce results relating its finite product structure with the monoidal structure of [C op ; Set] determined by that of C. We also investigate the closed structure. Finally, for completeness, we give results on bireflective subcategories in Rel(A), the category of relati...

Independent statements, i.e. statements that are neither provable nor refutable within a consistent system of axioms, have a singular attractive position in mathematics.