Profinite groupoids

["Prof. Peter Johnstone" <P.T.Johnstone@dpmms.cam.ac.uk>]

I've recently received an enquiry from a graduate student (below)
about whether the question "is every Stone topological groupoid
a profinite groupoid?" is still open. I've never considered the
question myself, and I don't recall seeing anything published on
the subject. Does anyone on this list know of a reference?

Peter Johnstone

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2011 08:46:27 +0200
From: Alexandru Chirvasitu <chirvasitua@gmail.com>
To: P.T.Johnstone@dpmms.cam.ac.uk
Subject: a technical question

Dear Professor Johnstone,
My name is Alexandru Chirvasitu, and I am a second year graduate student at
UC Berkeley. I apologize for the imposition, but there aren't many people I
know who could assist with the problem I had questions about. Being familiar
with some of your work, and since the question is one on Stone spaces, I
thought I'd ask. 

It's well known that a topological group whose underlying space is profinite
is automatically the limit of an inverse system of finite groups. The
question, briefly, is whether or not the same is true of profinite
groupoids. By this I mean that the spaces of arrows and objects are
profinite, and the source and target maps are continuous. Is it then the
case that the groupoid is an inverse limit (in the category of groupoids) of
finite groupoids? Is this problem open to your knowledge? 
The only direct reference I could find in the literature is in the Magid's
paper

Magid, Andy R.
The separable closure of some commutative rings.
Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 170 (1972), 109?124 

where he develops the Galois theory of commutative rings. He says that it
seems to be open, but that was a long time ago. 

In the course of a joint project with a fellow graduate student here at
Berkeley (having to do with Galois theory), we stumbled upon this problem.
We think we can construct, rather naturally, plenty of counterexamples; what
we do not know is whether or not the problem was previously open.  

This was pretty much it. My apologies again for taking up your time. I'm
sure any input you might have will be very valuable. 


Thank you,

Alexandru 


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