Medial

This article is about medial in mathematics. For other uses, see medial (disambiguation).

Medial magmas

In abstract algebra, a medial magma (or medial groupoid) is a set with a binary operation which satisfies the identity

$(x \cdot y) \cdot (u \cdot v) = (x \cdot u) \cdot (y \cdot v)$, or more simply, $xy\cdot uv = xu\cdot yv$

using the convention that juxtaposition has higher precedence. This identity has been variously called medial, abelian, alternation, transposition, interchange, bi-commutative, bisymmetric, surcommutative, entropic, etc.

Any commutative semigroup is a medial magma, and a medial magma has an identity element if and only if it is a commutative monoid. Another class of semigroups forming medial magmas are the normal bands. Medial magmas need not be associative: for any nontrivial abelian group and integers m ≠ n, replacing the group operation x + y with the binary operation $x \cdot y = mx+ny$ yields a medial magma which in general is neither associative nor commutative.

A magma M is medial if and only if its binary operation is a homomorphism from the Cartesian square M×M to M. This can easily be expressed in terms of a commutative diagram, and thus leads to the notion of a medial magma object in a category with a cartesian product. (See the discussion in auto magma object.)

If f and g are endomorphisms of a medial magma, then the mapping f.g defined by pointwise multiplication

$(f\cdot g)(x) = f(x)\cdot g(x)$

is itself an endomorphism.

Bruck-Toyoda theorem

The Bruck-Toyoda theorem provides the following characterization of medial quasigroups. Given an abelian group A and two automorphisms φ and ψ of A, define an operation ∗ on A by

x ∗ y  =  φ(x) + ψ(y) + c

where c some fixed element of A. It is not hard to prove that A forms a medial quasigroup under this operation. The Bruck-Toyoda theorem states that every medial quasigroup is of this form, i.e. is isomorphic to a quasigroup defined from an abelian group in this way. In particular, every medial quasigroup is isotopic to an abelian group.

Generalizations

The term medial or (more commonly) entropic is also used for a generalization to multiple operations. An algebraic structure is an entropic algebra if every two operations satisfy a generalization of the medial identity. Let f and g be operations of arity m and n, respectively. Then f and g are required to satisfy

$f( g(x_{11}, \ldots, x_{1n}), \ldots, g(x_{m1}, \ldots, g_{mn}) ) = g( f(x_{11}, \ldots, x_{m1}), \ldots, f(x_{1n}, \ldots, f_{mn}) ).$

See also

• Medial category