Chapter 4
Clones, Terms, and Equational Classes
In Chapter 3 we developed the structural side of our subject: subalgebras, homomorphism, quotients and products. These are notions familiar from your first-year course in abstract algebra. But what distinguishes universal algebra from the traditional study of groups and rings is its attention to semantics. We often characterize algebras by the operations they possess and the identities that they satisfy. That is the focus of the present chapter. The most beautiful and striking results in the subject (at least in the opinion of this author) provide bridges between the structural and the semantic. We shall meet several of these theorems in this chapter and many more in Part II.
4.1 Clones
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