Well-founded Boolean ultrapowers as large cardinal embeddings

Abstract

Boolean ultrapowers extend the classical ultrapower construction to work with ultrafilters on any complete Boolean algebra, rather than only on a power set algebra. When they are well-founded, the associated Boolean ultrapower embeddings exhibit a large cardinal nature, and the Boolean ultrapower construction thereby unifies two central themes of set theory---forcing and large cardinals---by revealing them to be two facets of a single underlying construction, the Boolean ultrapower.