A survey on divisibility of ultrafilters

Abstract

An extension of the divisibility relation on $\mathbb{N}$ to the set $\beta \mathbb{N}$ of ultrafilters on $\mathbb{N}$ was defined and investigated in several papers during the last ten years. Here we make a survey of results obtained so far, adding several results connecting the themes of different stages of the research. The highlights include: separation of $\beta \mathbb{N}$ into the lower part $L$ (with its division into levels) and the upper part; identifying basic ingredients (powers of primes) and fragmentation of each ultrafilter into them; finding the corresponding upward closed sets belonging to an ultrafilter with given basic ingredients; existence and number of successors and predecessors of a given divisibility class; extending the congruence relation (in two ways) and checking properties of the obtained relations.