I will review some recent results in the Borel reducibility on uncountable cardinals of the Helsinki logic group.
Borel reducibility on the generalised Baire space \kappa^\kappa for uncountable \kappa is defined analogously to that for \kappa=\omega. One of the corollaries of this work is that under some mild cardinality assumptions on kappa, if T1 is classifiable and T2 is unstable or superstable with OTOP, then the ISOM(T1) is continuously reducible ISOM(T2) and ISOM(T2) is not Borel reducible to ISOM(T1).
Chang's Conjecture is a strengthening of Lowenheim-Skolem-Tarski theorem. While Lowenheim-Skolem-Tarski theorem is provable in ZFC, any instance of Chang's Conjecture is independent with ZFC and has nontrivial consistency strength. Thus, the question of how many instances of Chang's Conjecture can consistently hold simultaneously is natural.
I will talk about some classical results on the impossibility of some instances of Chang's Conjecture and present some results from a joint work with Monroe Eskew.
Much of the early development of model theoretic stability theory was motivated by stable groups, which include algebraic groups as guiding examples. Later work of Hrushovski and Pillay showed that many tools from stable group theory can be adapted to the local setting, where one works around a single stable formula rather than a stable theory. More recently, groups definable in NIP theories have been intensively studied, bringing back the importance of measures in model theory. On the other hand, local NIP group theory is not as well understood.
I'll show how the Vandermonde determinant identity allows us to
estimate the volume of certain spaces of polynomials in one variable
(or rather, of homogeneous polynomials in two variables), as the degree
goes to infinity.
I'll explain what this is good for in the context of globally valued
fields, and, given time constraints, may give some indications on the
approach for the "real inequality" in higher projective dimension.
It is a familiar fact (sometimes attributed to Ahlbrandt-Ziegler, though it is possibly older) that two aleph0-categorical theories are bi-interpretable if and only if their countable models have isomorphic topological isomorphism groups. Conversely, groups arising in this manner can be given an abstract characterisation, and a countable model of the theory (up to bi-interpretation, of course) can be reconstructed.
In my master thesis we (Prof' Kobi Peterzil and I) investigated a problem in combinatorial geometry using tools from model theory. Following the article of Chernikov and Starchenko, "Regularity lemma for distal structures", we consider the Strong Erdos-Hajnal property for the incidence relation of points and lines in R^2. In particular, we compute a constant d such that for every finite sets of points P and lines L, with |P|,|L| > 2, there are a subsets P' of P and L' of L such that no point in P' lies on a line from L', and such that
|P'|>d|P| , |L'|>d|L|.
Abstract: We continue with the topic of the previous week. We will define the Radin forcing, discuss (without proof) and its basic properties. We will give Woodin's proof for the consistency of the existence of strong inaccessible without diamond and show how to strengthen it to the consistency of strong inaccessible without weak diamond.
Abstract: We will discuss the main steps in the proof of the theorem stating that if (G,+, ...) is a strongly minimal expansion of a group interpretable in an o-minimal expansion of a field, and \dim(G)=2 then G is a pure algebraic group.
Joint work with P. Eleftheriou and Y. Peterzil.
Dependent theories have now a very solid and well-established collection of results and applications. Beyond first order, the development of "dependency" has been rather scarce so far. In addition to the results due to Kaplan, Lavi and Shelah (dependent diagrams and the generic pair conjecture), I will speak on a few lines of current research around the extraction of indiscernibles for dependent diagrams and on various forms on dependence for abstract elementary classes. This is joint work with Saharon Shelah.
Sela proved that the theory of free groups is stable. It is thus natural to wonder what the independence relation looks like. Together with Sklinos, we worked out a complete characterization of forking independence in the standard model (over any set of parameters) in terms of an algebraic-geometric object called the JSJ decomposition, which encodes all the splittings of the group as an amalgamated product or an HNN extension relative to the parameter set.
In the talk we will try to give an idea of the proof over some examples.
Abstract: The notion of an ascent path through a tree, isolated by Laver, is a generalization of the notion of a cofinal branch and, in many cases, the existence of an ascent path through a tree provides a concrete obstruction to the tree being special. We will discuss some recent results regarding ascent paths through kappa-trees, where kappa > omega_1 is a regular cardinal. We will discuss the consistency of the existence or non-existence of a special mu^+-tree with a cf(mu)-ascent path, where mu is a singular cardinal.
Zilber's trichotomy conjecture, in modern formulation, distinguishes three flavours of geometries of strongly minimal sets --- disintegrated/trivial, modular, and the geometry of an ACF. Each of these three flavours has a classic ``template'' --- a set with no structure, a projective space over a prime field, and an algebraically closed field, respectively. The class of ab initio constructions with which Hrushovski refuted the conjecture features a new flavour of geometries --- non-modular, yet prohibiting any algebraic structure.
We isolate the property of being a critical point, and prove some basic positive
properties of them. We will also prove a lifting property that allows lifting
elementary embedding to symmetric extensions, and outline a construction that
shows that it is consistent that a successor of a critical cardinal is singular.
This is a recent work with Yair Hayut.
