The purpose of this paper is threefold: to present a general abstract, yet practical, notion of equational system; to investigate and develop the finitary construction of free algebras for equational systems; and to illustrate the use of equational systems as needed in modern applications. Key words: Equational system; algebra; free construction; monad. 1

We introduce an abstract general notion of system of equations between terms, called Term Equational System, and develop a sound logical deduction system, called Term Equational Logic, for equational reasoning. Further, we give an analysis of algebraic free constructions that together with an internal completeness result may be used to synthesise complete equational logics. Indeed, as an application, we synthesise a sound and complete nominal equational logic, called Synthetic Nominal Equational Logic, based on the category of Nominal Sets.

Modular rewriting seeks criteria under which rewrite systems inherit properties from their smaller subsystems. This divide and conquer methodology is particularly useful for reasoning about large systems where other techniques fail to scale adequately. Research has typically focused on reasoning about the modularity of specific properties for specific ways of combining specific forms of rewriting. This paper is, we believe, the first to ask a much more general question. Namely, what can be said about modularity independently of the specific form of rewriting, combination and property at hand. A priori there is no reason to believe that anything can actually be said about modularity without reference to the specifics of the particular systems etc. However, this paper shows that, quite surprisingly, much can indeed be said.

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to present a general abstract, yet practical, notion of equational system; to investigate and develop a theory of free constructions for such equational systems; and to illustrate the use of equational systems as needed in modern applications, specifically to the theory of substitution in the presence of variable binding and to models of name-passing process calculi. 1

Abstract. The finite π-calculus has an explicit set-theoretic functor-category model that is known to be fully abstract for strong late bisimulation congruence. We characterize this as the initial free algebra for an appropriate set of operations and equations in the enriched Lawvere theories of Plotkin and Power. Thus we obtain a novel algebraic description for models of the π-calculus, and validate an existing construction as the universal such model. The algebraic operations are intuitive, covering name creation, communication of names over channels, and nondeterminism; the equations then combine these features in a modular fashion. We work in an enriched setting, over a “possible worlds ” category of sets indexed by available names. This expands significantly on the classical notion of algebraic theories, and in particular allows us to use nonstandard arities that vary as processes evolve. Based on our algebraic theory we describe a category of models for the π-calculus, and show that they all preserve bisimulation congruence. We develop a direct construction of free models in this category; and generalise previous results to prove that all free-algebra models are fully abstract. 1

This paper shows that the problem is more subtle than might appear at first glance: final coalgebras can form monads just as easily as comonads and dually, initial algebras form both monads and comonads

Abstract. Parameterised monads have the same relationship to adjunctions with parameters as monads do to adjunctions. In this paper, we investigate algebras for parameterised monads. We identify the Eilenberg-