Ross Willard, Department of Pure Mathematics, University Waterloo
“Varieties with a difference term. I”
In a series of two or three lectures, I will describe the class of varieties (of algebras) which have a difference term. This class is relatively robust from the universal algebraic point of view, and contains all congruence modular varieties as well as all congruence meet-semidistributive varieties. In the first lecture I will introduce a Maltsev condition that characterizes this class, and begin the proof of the characterization.