Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
It is pointed out that many axiomatic systems include a condition of closure under binary composition. In the present development a study is made of the consequences of the weaker requirement of closure under ternary, or three-fold composition. As a preliminary step in the investigation, subsets of groups closed under n-fold multiplication are examined and characterized abstractly. Attention is then focused upon ternary algebras defined as linear subspaces of ℬ (ℋ) (bounded operators on some Hilbert space ℋ) closed under three-fold multiplication. These are shown to satisfy, under suitable conditions, a secondanticommutanttheorem, the analogue of the second commutant theorem which holds for (binary) algebras. It is a result which provides a useful technique for studying such ternary algebras, the structure of which are examined in some detail.