Subdirectly Irreducible Algebra - Applications

Applications

A necessary and sufficient condition for a Heyting algebra to be subdirectly irreducible is for there to be a greatest element strictly below 1. The witnessing pair is that element and 1, and identifying any other pair a, b of elements identifies both ab and ba with 1 thereby collapsing everything above those two implications to 1. Hence every finite chain of two or more elements as a Heyting algebra is subdirectly irreducible.

By Jónsson's Lemma the subdirect irreducibles of the variety generated by a class of subdirect irreducibles are no larger than the generating subdirect irreducibles, since the quotients and subalgebras of an algebra A are never larger than A itself. Hence the subdirect irreducibles in the variety generated by a finite linearly ordered Heyting algebra H must be just the nondegenerate quotients of H, namely all smaller linearly ordered nondegenerate Heyting algebras.

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