Dear Nathan, Your suggestion of deducing the countable splitting lemma from the finite one using the finite intersection property doesn't work, because the set of distributions on Nat is not compact. For example, let d_n be the distribution that is 1 on n and 0 everywhere else. This converges pointwise to the "distribution" that is 0 everywhere. So I still don't know how to prove the countable splitting lemma. Maybe you can get a student to write up Nawrotsky's algorithm in English... Paul On 27/07/16 12:27, Paul B Levy wrote:

Dear all,

I learnt years ago that the following definition gives an endofunctor D on the category Rel of sets and relations. But I have never seen a proof.

- For a set A, let DA be the set of discrete probability distributions on A, i.e. functions from A to nonnegative reals whose sum is 1. (Such functions are necessarily countably supported.)

- For a relation R : A -> B, let DR : DA -> DB relate d in DA to d' in DB when for every subset U of A, we have d(U) <= d'(R[U]), writing R[U] for the set of all R-images of elements of U. (It follows that for every subset V of B, we have d'(V) <= d(R^c[V]), writing R^c for the converse of R.)

To show D is a functor, the hard part is to show that, for relations R : A --> B and S : B --> C, and d in DA and d'' in DC with (d,d'') in D(S.R), there exists d' in DB such that (d,d') in DR and (d',d'') in DS. I would like to see a proof of this.

It's the discrete case of Theorem 1 (i)=>(ii) in

https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aop/1176995659

where two proofs are mentioned. Firstly, Nawrotski's, which is in German, which I can't read:

Nawrotski K (1962) Eine Montonieeigenschaft zufaelliger Punktfolgen, Math. Nachr. 24, pages 193-200.

Secondly, Strassen's:

https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177700153

which is in English but beyond my comprehension. Strassen also cites papers of Kellerer (in German) that might also contain a proof.

Can anyone give me a proof, please?

Two other things:

- For the subfunctor D_f of finitely supported distributions, the result is easier. It's the "splitting lemma" of probabilistic powerdomain theory, and was proved by Jones, and later by Jung and Tix, and earlier by Berge and dall'Aglio (cited by Strassen). But these proofs (at least, the ones I've seen) don't seem to adapt to the countably supported case.

- I know that D, being an endofunctor on Set that preserves weak pullbacks, has a unique extension to an endofunctor on Rel. But that doesn't help.

Regards, Paul

-- Paul Blain Levy School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pbl [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]