On a notion of the mathematical structure

My article “What is a mathematical structure” (2013) came out (#).

"A notion of the mathematical structure was introduced at the beginning of XX century. However, for a long time, mathematical objects were believed to be given always together with some structure, not necessarily unique, but at least natural (canonical). And only a practice, e.g., of functional analysis has led to conclusion that a canonical structure need not exist. For instance, there are different “natural” topologies of a set of rational numbers, different smooth structures of a four-dimensional topological Euclidean space, different measures on a real line, and so on.

In mathematics, different types of structures are considered. These are an algebraic structure, a topological structure, cells whose notion generalizes the Boolean algebras and so on. In the first volume of their course, Bourbaki provide a description of a mathematical structure which enables them to define “espece de structure” and, thus, characterize and compare different structures. However, this is a structure of mathematical theories formulated in terms of logic. We aim to suggest a wider definition of a structure which absorbs the Bourbaki one and the others, but can not characterize different types of structures. This definition is based on a notion of the relation on a set, and it generalizes the definition of a relational system in set theory.

Morphisms and functions are structures in this sense that provides a wide circle of perspective applications of this notion of the structure to mathematical physics.

In particular, let us mention the notions of the universal structure on a set (see Section 2) and the abstract structure on its own elements. One can show that any structure is a constituent of a universal structure, and that any structure admits an exact representation as a constituent of some abstract structure.

Though we follow the von Neumann – Bernays – Gödel set theory, structures on sets only are considered unless otherwise stated. This is sufficient in order to investigate real, e.g., physical systems."

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