Topological Incompleteness and Order Incompleteness of the Lambda Calculus

A model of the untyped lambda calculus induces a lambda theory, i.e., a congruence relation on -terms closed under and -conversion. A semantics (= class of models) of the lambda calculus is incomplete if there exists a lambda theory which is not induced by any model in the semantics. In this paper we introduce a new technique to prove the incompleteness of a wide range of lambda calculus semantics, including the strongly stable one, whose incompleteness had been conjectured by Bastonero-Gouy [6, 7] and by Berline [9]. The main results of the paper are a topological incompleteness theorem and an order incompleteness theorem. In the first one we show the incompleteness of the lambda calculus semantics given in terms of topological models whose topology satisfies a property of connectedness. In the second one we prove the incompleteness of the class of partially ordered models with finitely many connected components w.r.t. the Alexandroff topology. A further result of the paper is a proof of the completeness of the semantics of the lambda calculus given in terms of topological models whose topology is non-trivial and metrizable.