The aim of this paper is to study supersoluble skew braces, a class of skew braces that encompasses all finite skew braces of square-free order. It turns out that finite supersoluble skew braces have Sylow towers and that in an arbitrary supersoluble skew brace B many relevant skew brace-theoretical properties are easier to identify: For example, a centrally nilpotent ideal of B is B-centrally nilpotent, a fact that simplifies the computational search for the Fitting ideal; also, B has finite multipermutational level if and only if $(B,+)$ is nilpotent.

Given a finite presentation of the structure skew brace $G(X,r)$ associated with a finite nondegenerate solution of the Yang–Baxter equation (YBE), there is an algorithm that decides if $G(X,r)$ is supersoluble or not. Moreover, supersoluble skew braces are examples of almost polycyclic skew braces, so they give rise to solutions of the YBE on which one can algorithmically work on.

We initiate the study of computable presentations of real and complex C*-algebras under the program of effective metric structure theory. With the group situation as a model, we develop corresponding notions of recursive presentations and word problems for C*-algebras, and show some analogous results hold in this setting. Famously, every finitely generated group with a computable presentation is computably categorical, but we provide a counterexample in the case of C*-algebras. On the other hand, we show every finite-dimensional C*-algebra is computably categorical.

Extending Aanderaa’s classical result that $\pi ^{1}_{1} < \sigma ^{1}_{1}$ , we determine the order between any two patterns of iterated $\Sigma ^{1}_{1}$ - and $\Pi ^{1}_{1}$ -reflection on ordinals. We show that this order of linear reflection is a prewellordering of length $\omega ^{\omega }$ . This requires considering the relationship between linear and some non-linear reflection patterns, such as $\sigma \wedge \pi $ , the pattern of simultaneous $\Sigma ^{1}_{1}$ - and $\Pi ^{1}_{1}$ -reflection. The proofs involve linking the lengths of $\alpha $ -recursive wellorderings to various forms of stability and reflection properties satisfied by ordinals $\alpha $ within standard and non-standard models of set theory.

We prove that a finitely generated semigroup whose word problem is a one-counter language has a linear growth function. This provides us with a very strong restriction on the structure of such a semigroup, which, in particular, yields an elementary proof of a result of Herbst, that a group with a one-counter word problem is virtually cyclic. We prove also that the word problem of a group is an intersection of finitely many one-counter languages if and only if the group is virtually abelian.

It is proved that the following classes of finitely generated groups have $\Pi_1^1$-complete first-order theories: all finitely generated groups, the $n$-generated groups, and the strictly $n$-generated groups ($n\,{\geqslant}\,2$). Moreover, all those theories are distinct. Similar techniques show that quasi-finitely axiomatizable groups have a hyperarithmetical word problem, where a finitely generated group is quasi-finitely axiomatizable if it is the only finitely generated group satisfying an appropriate first-order sentence. The Turing degrees of word problems of quasi-finitely axiomatizable groups form a cofinal set in the Turing degrees of hyperarithmetical sets.

In this paper it is shown how the graphical methods developed by Stephen for analyzing inverse semigroup presentations may be used to study varieties of inverse semigroups. In particular, these methods may be used to solve the word problem for the free objects in the variety of inverse semigroups generated by the five-element combinatorial Brandt semigroup and in the variety of inverse semigroups determined by laws of the form xn = xn + 1. Covering space methods are used to study the free objects in a variety of the form ∨ where is a variety of inverse semigroups and is the variety of groups.