Subproduct Systems and Cartesian Systems: New Results on Factorial Languages and their Relations with Other Areas

We point out that a sequence of natural numbers is the dimension sequence of a subproduct system if and only if it is the cardinality sequence of a word system (or factorial language). Determining such sequences is, therefore, reduced to a purely combinatorial problem in the combinatorics of words. A corresponding (and equivalent) result for graded algebras has been known in abstract algebra, but this connection with pure combinatorics has not yet been noticed by the product systems community. We also introduce Cartesian systems, which can be seen either as a set theoretic version of subproduct systems or an abstract version of word systems. Applying this, we provide several new results on the cardinality sequences of word systems and the dimension sequences of subproduct systems.