Restricted Priestley dualities and discriminator varieties

Abstract

Anyone who has ever worked with a variety~$\boldsymbol{\mathscr{A}}$ of algebras with a reduct in the variety of bounded distributive lattices will know a restricted Priestley duality when they meet one---but until now there has been no abstract definition. Here we provide one. After deriving some basic properties of a restricted Priestley dual category $\boldsymbol{\mathscr{X}}$ of such a variety, we give a characterisation, in terms of $\boldsymbol{\mathscr{X}}$, of finitely generated discriminator subvarieties of~$\boldsymbol{\mathscr{A}}$. As a first application of our characterisation, we give a new proof of Sankappanavar's characterisation of finitely generated discriminator varieties of distributive double p-algebras. A substantial portion of the paper is devoted to the application of our results to Cornish algebras. A Cornish algebra is a bounded distributive lattice equipped with a family of unary operations each of which is either an endomorphism or a dual endomorphism of the bounded lattice. They are a natural generalisation of Ockham algebras, which have been extensively studied. We give an external necessary-and-sufficient condition and an easily applied, completely internal, sufficient condition for a finite set of finite Cornish algebras to share a common ternary discriminator term and so generate a discriminator variety. Our results give a characterisation of discriminator varieties of Ockham algebras as a special case, thereby yielding Davey, Nguyen and Pitkethly's characterisation of quasi-primal Ockham algebras.