8
$\begingroup$

Many people are familiar with some properties of binary relations, such as reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity.

What are the commonly studied properties of ternary (3-ary) relations?

If you could provide a motivating example of why the property is interesting that would also be helpful.

  • 5
    Whether they describe a function S x S -> S. Whether that function is associative. Whether it is commutative...2010-08-03
  • 0
    I'm now sure why you put that as a comment rather than as an answer.2010-08-03
  • 1
    community wiki, probably?2010-08-03
  • 0
    @Grigory: This one is hard to call2010-08-03
  • 1
    Some references that may be of interest. On page 146 of http://dml.cz/bitstream/handle/10338.dmlcz/128381/CzechMathJ_43-1993-1_12.pdf there is a list of properties of ternary relations. References [6] and [7] of that paper discuss other properties.2010-08-03

6 Answers 6