Equational Theories of Idempotent Semifields (Joint work with Simon Santschi)

This talk will be about idempotent semifields, which, from a purely algebraic perspective are just lattice-ordered groups formulated in a restricted language with the group multiplication, neutral element, and lattice-join operation. We will see that although countably infinitely many equational theories of lattice-ordered groups have a finite equational basis, no non-trivial equational theory of idempotent semifields has this property. On the other hand, as in the case of lattice-ordered groups, there are continuum-many equational theories of classes of idempotent semifields. Finally, we will relate the problem of deciding equations in the class of idempotent semifields to the problem of deciding if there exists a right order on a free group satisfying a given finite set of inequalities, and show that these problems are, respectively, co-NP-complete and NP-complete.