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Ultraproducts as a Bridge Between Discrete and Continuous Analysis

7 December, 2013 in expository, math.CA, math.CO, math.DS, math.LO, talk | Tags: , , , , , | by | 33 comments

(This is an extended blog post version of my talk “Ultraproducts as a Bridge Between Discrete and Continuous Analysis” that I gave at the Simons institute for the theory of computing at the workshop “Neo-Classical methods in discrete analysis“. Some of the material here is drawn from previous blog posts, notably “Ultraproducts as a bridge between hard analysis and soft analysis” and “Ultralimit analysis and quantitative algebraic geometry“‘. The text here has substantially more details than the talk; one may wish to skip all of the proofs given here to obtain a closer approximation to the original talk.)

Discrete analysis, of course, is primarily interested in the study of discrete (or “finitary”) mathematical objects: integers, rational numbers (which can be viewed as ratios of integers), finite sets, finite graphs, finite or discrete metric spaces, and so forth. However, many powerful tools in mathematics (e.g. ergodic theory, measure theory, topological group theory, algebraic geometry, spectral theory, etc.) work best when applied to continuous (or “infinitary”) mathematical objects: real or complex numbers, manifolds, algebraic varieties, continuous topological or metric spaces, etc. In order to apply results and ideas from continuous mathematics to discrete settings, there are basically two approaches. One is to directly discretise the arguments used in continuous mathematics, which often requires one to keep careful track of all the bounds on various quantities of interest, particularly with regard to various error terms arising from discretisation which would otherwise have been negligible in the continuous setting. The other is to construct continuous objects as limits of sequences of discrete objects of interest, so that results from continuous mathematics may be applied (often as a “black box”) to the continuous limit, which then can be used to deduce consequences for the original discrete objects which are quantitative (though often ineffectively so). The latter approach is the focus of this current talk.

The following table gives some examples of a discrete theory and its continuous counterpart, together with a limiting procedure that might be used to pass from the former to the latter:

(Discrete) (Continuous) (Limit method)
Ramsey theory Topological dynamics Compactness
Density Ramsey theory Ergodic theory Furstenberg correspondence principle
Graph/hypergraph regularity Measure theory Graph limits
Polynomial regularity Linear algebra Ultralimits
Structural decompositions Hilbert space geometry Ultralimits
Fourier analysis Spectral theory Direct and inverse limits
Quantitative algebraic geometry Algebraic geometry Schemes
Discrete metric spaces Continuous metric spaces Gromov-Hausdorff limits
Approximate group theory Topological group theory Model theory

As the above table illustrates, there are a variety of different ways to form a limiting continuous object. Roughly speaking, one can divide limits into three categories:

  • Topological and metric limits. These notions of limits are commonly used by analysts. Here, one starts with a sequence (or perhaps a net) of objects {x_n} in a common space {X}, which one then endows with the structure of a topological space or a metric space, by defining a notion of distance between two points of the space, or a notion of open neighbourhoods or open sets in the space. Provided that the sequence or net is convergent, this produces a limit object {\lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} x_n}, which remains in the same space, and is “close” to many of the original objects {x_n} with respect to the given metric or topology.
  • Categorical limits. These notions of limits are commonly used by algebraists. Here, one starts with a sequence (or more generally, a diagram) of objects {x_n} in a category {X}, which are connected to each other by various morphisms. If the ambient category is well-behaved, one can then form the direct limit {\varinjlim x_n} or the inverse limit {\varprojlim x_n} of these objects, which is another object in the same category {X}, and is connected to the original objects {x_n} by various morphisms.
  • Logical limits. These notions of limits are commonly used by model theorists. Here, one starts with a sequence of objects {x_{\bf n}} or of spaces {X_{\bf n}}, each of which is (a component of) a model for given (first-order) mathematical language (e.g. if one is working in the language of groups, {X_{\bf n}} might be groups and {x_{\bf n}} might be elements of these groups). By using devices such as the ultraproduct construction, or the compactness theorem in logic, one can then create a new object {\lim_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} x_{\bf n}} or a new space {\prod_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} X_{\bf n}}, which is still a model of the same language (e.g. if the spaces {X_{\bf n}} were all groups, then the limiting space {\prod_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} X_{\bf n}} will also be a group), and is “close” to the original objects or spaces in the sense that any assertion (in the given language) that is true for the limiting object or space, will also be true for many of the original objects or spaces, and conversely. (For instance, if {\prod_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} X_{\bf n}} is an abelian group, then the {X_{\bf n}} will also be abelian groups for many {{\bf n}}.)

The purpose of this talk is to highlight the third type of limit, and specifically the ultraproduct construction, as being a “universal” limiting procedure that can be used to replace most of the limits previously mentioned. Unlike the topological or metric limits, one does not need the original objects {x_{\bf n}} to all lie in a common space {X} in order to form an ultralimit {\lim_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} x_{\bf n}}; they are permitted to lie in different spaces {X_{\bf n}}; this is more natural in many discrete contexts, e.g. when considering graphs on {{\bf n}} vertices in the limit when {{\bf n}} goes to infinity. Also, no convergence properties on the {x_{\bf n}} are required in order for the ultralimit to exist. Similarly, ultraproduct limits differ from categorical limits in that no morphisms between the various spaces {X_{\bf n}} involved are required in order to construct the ultraproduct.

With so few requirements on the objects {x_{\bf n}} or spaces {X_{\bf n}}, the ultraproduct construction is necessarily a very “soft” one. Nevertheless, the construction has two very useful properties which make it particularly useful for the purpose of extracting good continuous limit objects out of a sequence of discrete objects. First of all, there is Łos’s theorem, which roughly speaking asserts that any first-order sentence which is asymptotically obeyed by the {x_{\bf n}}, will be exactly obeyed by the limit object {\lim_{{\bf n} \rightarrow \alpha} x_{\bf n}}; in particular, one can often take a discrete sequence of “partial counterexamples” to some assertion, and produce a continuous “complete counterexample” that same assertion via an ultraproduct construction; taking the contrapositives, one can often then establish a rigorous equivalence between a quantitative discrete statement and its qualitative continuous counterpart. Secondly, there is the countable saturation property that ultraproducts automatically enjoy, which is a property closely analogous to that of compactness in topological spaces, and can often be used to ensure that the continuous objects produced by ultraproduct methods are “complete” or “compact” in various senses, which is particularly useful in being able to upgrade qualitative (or “pointwise”) bounds to quantitative (or “uniform”) bounds, more or less “for free”, thus reducing significantly the burden of “epsilon management” (although the price one pays for this is that one needs to pay attention to which mathematical objects of study are “standard” and which are “nonstandard”). To achieve this compactness or completeness, one sometimes has to restrict to the “bounded” portion of the ultraproduct, and it is often also convenient to quotient out the “infinitesimal” portion in order to complement these compactness properties with a matching “Hausdorff” property, thus creating familiar examples of continuous spaces, such as locally compact Hausdorff spaces.

Ultraproducts are not the only logical limit in the model theorist’s toolbox, but they are one of the simplest to set up and use, and already suffice for many of the applications of logical limits outside of model theory. In this post, I will set out the basic theory of these ultraproducts, and illustrate how they can be used to pass between discrete and continuous theories in each of the examples listed in the above table.

Apart from the initial “one-time cost” of setting up the ultraproduct machinery, the main loss one incurs when using ultraproduct methods is that it becomes very difficult to extract explicit quantitative bounds from results that are proven by transferring qualitative continuous results to the discrete setting via ultraproducts. However, in many cases (particularly those involving regularity-type lemmas) the bounds are already of tower-exponential type or worse, and there is arguably not much to be lost by abandoning the explicit quantitative bounds altogether.

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