We exhibit a bridge between the theory of cellular categories, used in algebraic topology and homological algebra, and the model-theoretic notion of stable independence. Roughly speaking, we show that the combinatorial cellular categories (those where, in a precise sense, the cellular morphisms are generated by a set) are exactly those that give rise to stable independence notions. We give two applications: on the one hand, we show that the abstract elementary classes of roots of Ext studied by Baldwin–Eklof–Trlifaj are stable and tame. On the other hand, we give a simpler proof (in a special case) that combinatorial categories are closed under 2-limits, a theorem of Makkai and Rosický.

We introduce and study model-theoretic connected components of rings as an analogue of model-theoretic connected components of definable groups. We develop their basic theory and use them to describe both the definable and classical Bohr compactifications of rings. We then use model-theoretic connected components to explicitly calculate Bohr compactifications of some classical matrix groups, such as the discrete Heisenberg group ${\mathrm {UT}}_3({\mathbb {Z}})$, the continuous Heisenberg group ${\mathrm {UT}}_3({\mathbb {R}})$, and, more generally, groups of upper unitriangular and invertible upper triangular matrices over unital rings.

We introduce an infinite variant of hypersurface support for finite-dimensional, noncommutative complete intersections. We show that hypersurface support defines a support theory for the big singularity category $\operatorname {Sing}(R)$ , and that the support of an object in $\operatorname {Sing}(R)$ vanishes if and only if the object itself vanishes. Our work is inspired by Avramov and Buchweitz’ support theory for (commutative) local complete intersections. In the companion piece [27], we employ hypersurface support for infinite-dimensional modules, and the results of the present paper, to classify thick ideals in stable categories for a number of families of finite-dimensional Hopf algebras.

We study ring-theoretic (in)finiteness properties—such as Dedekind-finiteness and proper infiniteness—of ultraproducts (and more generally, reduced products) of Banach algebras.

While we characterise when an ultraproduct has these ring-theoretic properties in terms of its underlying sequence of algebras, we find that, contrary to the $C^*$ -algebraic setting, it is not true in general that an ultraproduct has a ring-theoretic finiteness property if and only if “ultrafilter many” of the underlying sequence of algebras have the same property. This might appear to violate the continuous model theoretic counterpart of Łoś’s Theorem; the reason it does not is that for a general Banach algebra, the ring theoretic properties we consider cannot be verified by considering a bounded subset of the algebra of fixed bound. For Banach algebras, we construct counter-examples to show, for example, that each component Banach algebra can fail to be Dedekind-finite while the ultraproduct is Dedekind-finite, and we explain why such a counter-example is not possible for $C^*$ -algebras. Finally, the related notion of having stable rank one is also studied for ultraproducts.

We propose a generalisation for the notion of the centre of an algebra in the setup of algebras graded by an arbitrary abelian group $G$. Our generalisation, which we call the $G$-centre, is designed to control the endomorphism category of the grading shift functors. We show that the $G$-centre is preserved by gradable derived equivalences given by tilting modules. We also discuss links with existing notions in superalgebra theory.

We prove that every endomorphism of an infinite-dimensional vector space over a field splits into the sum of four idempotents and into the sum of four square-zero endomorphisms, a result that is optimal in general.

We prove that there is no algorithm to determine when an amalgam of finite rings (or semigroups) can be embedded in the class of rings or in the class of finite rings (respectively, in the class of semigroups or in the class of finite semigroups). These results are in marked contrast with the corresponding problems for groups where every amalgam of finite groups can be embedded in a finite group.