We consider maximal almost disjoint families of block subspaces of countable vector spaces, focusing on questions of their size and definability. We prove that the minimum infinite cardinality of such a family cannot be decided in ZFC and that the “spectrum” of cardinalities of mad families of subspaces can be made arbitrarily large, in analogy to results for mad families on ω. We apply the author’s local Ramsey theory for vector spaces [32] to give partial results concerning their definability.

Let $K$ be a field that admits a cyclic Galois extension of degree $n\geq 2$. The symmetric group $S_{n}$ acts on $K^{n}$ by permutation of coordinates. Given a subgroup $G$ of $S_{n}$ and $u\in K^{n}$, let $V_{G}(u)$ be the $K$-vector space spanned by the orbit of $u$ under the action of $G$. In this paper we show that, for a special family of groups $G$ of affine type, the dimension of $V_{G}(u)$ can be computed via the greatest common divisor of certain polynomials in $K[x]$. We present some applications of our results to the cases $K=\mathbb{Q}$ and $K$ finite.

Finding the intersection of $n$-dimensional spheres in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ is an interesting problem with applications in trilateration, global positioning systems, multidimensional scaling and distance geometry. In this paper, we generalize some known results on finding the intersection of spheres, based on QR decomposition. Our main result describes the intersection of any number of $n$-dimensional spheres without the assumption that the centres of the spheres are affinely independent. A possible application in the interval distance geometry problem is also briefly discussed.

A basis ${\mathcal{B}}=\{u_{i}\}_{i\in I}$ of a commutative or anticommutative algebra $\mathfrak{C},$ over an arbitrary base field $\mathbb{F}$, is called multiplicative if for any $i,j\in I$ we have that $u_{i}u_{j}\in \mathbb{F}u_{k}$ for some $k\in I$. We show that if a commutative or anticommutative algebra $\mathfrak{C}$ admits a multiplicative basis then it decomposes as the direct sum $\mathfrak{C}=\bigoplus _{j}\mathfrak{i}_{j}$ of well-described ideals each one of which admits a multiplicative basis. Also the minimality of $\mathfrak{C}$ is characterised in terms of the multiplicative basis and it is shown that, under a mild condition, the above direct sum is indexed by the family of its minimal ideals admitting a multiplicative basis.