Weak distributive laws and their role in lattices of congruences and equational theories

By a result of Pigozzi and Kogalovskii, every algebraic latticeL having a completely join —irreducible top element can be represented as the lattice L() of equational theories extending some fixed theory . Conversely, strengthening a recent result due to Lampe, we show that such a representationL=L() forcesL to satisfy the following condition: if the top element ofL is the join of a nonempty subsetB ofL then there are elementsb..., B such thata=(... (((b₁ a) b₂) a) ... b_n) a for alla L. In presence of modularity, this equation reduces to the identitya=(a b₁) ... (a b_n). Motivated by these facts, we study several weak forms of distributive laws in arbitrary lattices and related types of prime elements. The main tool for applications to universal algebra is a generalized version of Lampe's Zipper Lemma.Presented by Ralph Freese.