Logic Graduate Seminar, previous semesters

This is an historic listing of the talks in the Graduate Logic Student Seminar.

Spring 2018

January 29, Organizational meeting

This day we decided the schedule for the semester.

February 5, Uri Andrews

Title: Building Models of Strongly Minimal Theories - Part 1

Abstract: Since I'm talking in the Tuesday seminar as well, I'll use the Monday seminar talk to do some background on the topic and some lemmas that will go into the proofs in Tuesday's talk. There will be (I hope) some theorems of interest to see on both days, and both on the general topic of answering the following question: What do you need to know about a strongly minimal theory in order to compute copies of all of its countable models. I'll start with a definition for strongly minimal theories and build up from there.

February 12, James Hanson

Title: Finding Definable Sets in Continuous Logic

Abstract: In order to be useful the notion of a 'definable set' in continuous logic is stricter than a naive comparison to discrete logic would suggest. As a consequence, even in relatively tame theories there can be very few definable sets. For example, there is a superstable theory with no non-trivial definable sets. As we'll see, however, there are many definable sets in omega-stable, omega-categorical, and other small theories.

February 19, Noah Schweber

Title: Proper forcing

Abstract: Although a given forcing notion may have nice properties on its own, those properties might vanish when we apply it repeatedly. Early preservation results (that is, theorems saying that the iteration of forcings with a nice property retains that nice property) were fairly limited, and things really got off the ground with Shelah's invention of "proper forcing." Roughly speaking, a forcing is proper if it can be approximated by elementary submodels of the universe in a particularly nice way. I'll define proper forcing and sketch some applications.

February 26, Patrick Nicodemus

Title: A survey of computable and constructive mathematics in economic history

March 5, Tamvana Makulumi

Title: Convexly Orderable Groups

March 12, Dan Turetsky (University of Notre Dame)

Title: Structural Jump

March 19, Ethan McCarthy

Title: Networks and degrees of points in non-second countable spaces

April 2, Wil Cocke

Title: Characterizing Finite Nilpotent Groups via Word Maps

Abstract: In this talk, we will examine a novel characterization of finite nilpotent groups using the probability distributions induced by word maps. In particular we show that a finite group is nilpotent if and only if every surjective word map has fibers of uniform size.

April 9, Tejas Bhojraj

Title: Quantum Randomness

Abstract: I will read the paper by Nies and Scholz where they define a notion of algorithmic randomness for infinite sequences of quantum bits (qubits). This talk will cover the basic notions of quantum randomness on which my talk on Tuesday will be based.

April 16, Iván Ongay-Valverde

Title: What can we say about sets made by the union of Turing equivalence classes?

Abstract: It is well known that given a real number x (in the real line) the set of all reals that have the same Turing degree (we will call this a Turing equivalence class) have order type 'the rationals' and that, unless x is computable, the set is not a subfield of the reals. Nevertheless, what can we say about the order type or the algebraic structure of a set made by the uncountable union of Turing equivalence classes?

This topic hasn't been deeply studied. In this talk I will focus principally on famous order types and answer whether they can be achieved or not. Furthermore, I will explain some possible connections with the automorphism problem of the Turing degrees.

This is a work in progress, so this talk will have multiple open questions and opportunities for feedback and public participation.(hopefully).

April 23, Ethan McCarthy (Thesis Defense) Start 3:45 Room B231

Title: Cototal enumeration degrees and their applications to effective mathematics

Abstract: The enumeration degrees measure the relative computational difficulty of enumerating sets of natural numbers. Unlike the Turing degrees, the enumeration degrees of a set and its complement need not be comparable. A set is total if it is enumeration above its complement. Taken together, the enumeration degrees of total sets form an embedded copy of the Turing degrees within the enumeration degrees. A set of natural numbers is cototal if it is enumeration reducible to its complement. Surprisingly, the degrees of cototal sets, the cototal degrees, form an intermediate structure strictly between the total degrees and the enumeration degrees.

Jeandel observed that cototal sets appear in a wide class of structures: as the word problems of simple groups, as the languages of minimal subshifts, and more generally as the maximal points of any c.e. quasivariety. In the case of minimal subshifts, the enumeration degree of the subshift's language determines the subshift's Turing degree spectrum: the collection of Turing degrees obtained by the points of the subshift. We prove that cototality precisely characterizes the Turing degree spectra of minimal subshifts: the degree spectra of nontrivial minimal subshifts are precisely the cototal enumeration cones. On the way to this result, we will give several other characterizations of the cototal degrees, including as the degrees of maximal anti-chain complements on [math]\displaystyle{ \omega^{\lt \omega} }[/math], and as the degrees of enumeration-pointed trees on [math]\displaystyle{ 2^{\lt \omega} }[/math], and we will remark on some additional applications of these characterizations.

April 30, Iván Ongay-Valverde

Title: Definibility of the Frobenius orbits and an application to sets of rational distances.

Abstract: In this talk I'll present a paper by Hector Pastén. We will talk about how having a formula that identify a Frobenius orbits can help you show an analogue case of Hilbert's tenth problem (the one asking for an algorithm that tells you if a diophantine equation is solvable or not).

Finally, if time permits, we will do an application that solves the existence of a dense set in the plane with rational distances, assuming some form of the ABC conjecture. This last question was propose by Erdös and Ulam.

Fall 2017

September 11, Organizational meeting

This day we decided the schedule for the semester.

September 18, Noah Schweber

Title: The Kunen inconsistency

Abstract: While early large cardinal axioms were usually defined combinatorially - e.g., cardinals satisfying a version of Ramsey's theorem - later focus shifted to model-theoretic definitions, specifically definitions in terms of elementary embeddings of the whole universe of sets. At the lowest level, a measurable cardinal is one which is the least cardinal moved (= critical point) by a nontrivial elementary embedding from V into some inner model M.

There are several variations on this theme yielding stronger and stronger large cardinal notions; one of the most important is the inclusion of *correctness properties* of the target model M. The strongest such correctness property is total correctness: M=V. The critical point of an elementary embedding from V to V is called a *Reinhardt cardinal*. Shortly after their introduction in Reinhardt's thesis, however, the existence of a Reinhardt cardinal was shown to be inconsistent with ZFC.

I'll present this argument, and talk a bit about the role of choice.

September 25, Noah Schweber

Title: Hindman's theorem via ultrafilters

Abstract: Hindman's theorem is a Ramsey-type theorem in additive combinatorics: if we color the natural numbers with two colors, there is an infinite set such that any *finite sum* from that set has the same color as any other finite sum. There are (to my knowledge) two proofs of Hindman's theorem: one of them is a complicated mess of combinatorics, and the other consists of cheating wildly. We'll do.

October 2, James Hanson

Title: The Gromov-Hausdorff metric on type space in continuous logic

Abstract: The Gromov-Hausdorff metric is a notion of the 'distance' between two metric spaces. Although it is typically studied in the context of compact or locally compact metric spaces, the definition is sensible even when applied to non-compact metric spaces, but in that context it is only a pseudo-metric: there are non-isomorphic metric spaces with Gromov-Hausdorff distance 0. This gives rise to an equivalence relation that is slightly coarser than isomorphism. There are continuous first-order theories which are categorical with regards to this equivalence relation while failing to be isometrically categorical, so it is natural to look for analogs of the Ryll-Nardzewski theorem and Morley's theorem, but before we can do any of that, it'll be necessary to learn about the "topometric" structure induced on type space by the Gromov-Hausdorff metric.

October 9, James Hanson

Title: Morley rank and stability in continuous logic

Abstract: There are various ways of counting the 'size' of subsets of metric spaces. Using these we can do a kind of Cantor-Bendixson analysis on type spaces in continuous first-order theories, and thereby define a notion of Morley rank. More directly we can define > the 'correct' notion of stability in the continuous setting. There are also natural Gromov-Hausdorff (GH) analogs of these notions. With this we'll prove that inseparably categorical theories have atomic models over arbitrary sets, which is an important step in the proof of Morley's theorem in this setting. The same proof with essentially cosmetic changes gives that inseparably GH-categorical theories have 'GH-atomic' models over arbitrary sets, but GH-atomic models fail to be GH-unique in general.

October 23, Tamvana Makulumi

Title: Boxy sets in ordered convexly-orderable structures.

October 30, Iván Ongay-Valverde

Title: Dancing SCCA and other Coloring Axioms

Abstract: In this talk I will talk about some axioms that are closely related to SOCA (Semi Open Coloring Axiom), being the main protagonist SCCA (Semi Clopen Coloring Axiom). I will give a motivation on the statements of both axioms, a little historic perspective and showing that both axioms coincide for separable Baire spaces. This is a work in progress, so I will share some open questions that I'm happy to discuss.

November 6, Wil Cocke

Title: Two new characterizations of nilpotent groups

Abstract: We will give two new characterizations of finite nilpotent groups. One using information about the order of products of elements of prime order and the other using the induced probability distribution from word maps.

Or...

Title: Centralizing Propagating Properties of Groups

Abstract: We will examine some sentences known to have finite spectrum when conjoined with the theory of groups. Hopefully we will be able to find new examples.

November 13, Steffen Lempp

Title: The computational complexity of properties of finitely presented groups

Abstract: I will survey index set complexity results on finitely presented groups.

November 20, Ethan McCarthy

Title: Strong Difference Randomness

Abstract: The difference randoms were introduced by Franklin and Ng to characterize the incomplete Martin-Löf randoms. More recently, Bienvenu and Porter introduced the strong difference randoms, obtained by imposing the Solovay condition over the class of difference tests. I will give a Demuth test characterization of the strong difference randoms, along with a lowness characterization of them among the Martin-Löf randoms.

December 4, Tejas Bhojraj

Title: Quantum Algorithmic Randomness

Abstract: I will discuss the recent paper by Nies and Scholz where they define quantum Martin-Lof randomness (q-MLR) for infinite sequences of qubits. If time permits, I will introduce the notion of quantum Solovay randomness and show that it is equivalent to q-MLR in some special cases.

December 11, Grigory Terlov

Title: The Logic of Erdős–Rényi Graphs