Noetherian Forms

Link to a plenary talk on noetherian forms at a BRICS conference (2021): slides of the talk, recording of the talk.

Link to a talk on noetherian forms at the PALS seminar (2020): written summary, recording of the talk.

Noetherian forms are mathematical structures defined by self-dual axioms, that include all lattices, Janelidze-Marki-Tholen semi-abelian categories and Grandis exact categories. They can be seen as a realization of Saunders Mac Lane's hypothesis from his 1950 paper on Duality for Groups that self-dual axioms can be found to treat isomorphism theorems for non-abelian groups, as this is realized for abelian groups with the notion of an abelian category. Abelian categories are actually given by the overlap of semi-abelian and exact categories.

The term "noetherian" refers to the fact that these forms can seen as a fulfilment of Emmy Noether's program to "disregard the elements and operations in algebraic structures in favor of selected subsets, linked to homomorphisms between structures by the homomorphism and isomorphism theorems" - quote from Colin Maclarty's article.

See this list for relevant papers in this research area.

Work in progress and current conjectures / open questions regarding noetherian forms:

• Noetherian forms found for the category of sets - a paper on this is in preparation. Conjecture: these forms are present already for an arbitrary topos.
• The category of Hilbert spaces and continuous linear maps is an additive category, but not an abelian category. Conjecture: it nevertheless admits a noetherian form. Question: if there is indeed such noetherian form, is it of any use for quantum mechanics / quantum field theory?