Benjamin Miller : Forceless, ineffective, powerless proofs of descriptive set-theoretic dichotomy theorems

Posted by , part of the Departmental Colloquium.

At

April 24, 2009, 3 p.m.

In

SEO 636

Abstract

Since its inception, the study of definable subsets of the real numbers has been dominated by a variety of structural dichotomy theorems. In recent times, the proofs of these theorems have grow increasingly complex and dependent upon techniques from mathematical logic. After giving a brief history of the subject, I will discuss a new approach to giving classical proofs of these results which is motivated by ideas from graph theory.