Strolling through common meadows

Abstract

This paper establishes a connection between rings, lattices and common meadows. Meadows are commutative and associative algebraic structures with two operations (addition and multiplication) with additive and multiplicative identities and for which inverses are total. Common meadows are meadows that introduce, as the inverse of zero, an error term a which is absorbent for addition. We show that common meadows are unions of rings which are ordered by a partial order that defines a lattice. These results allow us to extend some classical algebraic constructions to the setting of common meadows. We also briefly consider common meadows from a categorical perspective.