Mad, med, mcg and other maximal combinatorial objects
Date/Time:22 Jan 2020 17:00
Venue: S17 #04-06 SR1
Speaker: Asger Dag Toernquist, Kobenhavns Universitet
Mad, med, mcg and other maximal combinatorial objects
This talk is about the descriptive set theory and infinitary combinatorics. In the past 6 years, a number of long-standing problems related to the definability (in the sense of effective descriptive set theory) of so-called maximal almost disjoint (mad) families, maximal eventually different (med) families, and maximal cofinitary groups (mcg) have been solved by an array of authors. I will give an overview of these developments.
Almost disjoint families are families of infinite subsets of omega where any two distinct elements of the family intersect finitely; eventually different families are families of functions from omega to omega such that any two distinct functions in the family are eventually different; and cofinitary groups are subgroups of the group of all permutations of omega with the property that all non-identity elements of the group have at most finitely many fixed points. Maximality of such objects in all cases means maximal under inclusion (among such families).
A classical result due to Adrian Mathias states that no analytic infinite mad families. A slew of recent results shed light on this classical result by showing that under suitable descriptive set-theoretic regularity assumptions, there are no mad families at all (and this localizes to suitable pointclasses, especially to analytic sets). In a totally unexpected twist, Horowitz and Shelah showed in 2016 that there are Borel med families and mcg, solving a long-standing problem. I will finish the talk by discussing some related, still unsolved problems, especially the following: Is there a maximal (infinite) analytic set of pairwise Turing-incomparable reals?
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