Activities This Week

The strong non-independence property was introduced by Shelah in order to capture, within the class of theories without the independence property (aka dependent theories), an analogue of the class of super-stable theories. Shelah conjectured (roughly) that any infinite field with the strong non-independence property (aka strongly dependent) is either real closed, algebraically closed or supports a definable (henselian) valuation. The conjecture was solved (Johnson) in the very special case of dp-minimal fields, and otherwise remains wide open. In fact, most experts believe the conjecture (replacing “algebraically closed” with “separably closed”) to be true of all fields without the independence property, and the algebraic division line between the two classes of fields remains unclear.

In the talk we will show that strongly dependent ordered abelian groups do have a simple algebraic characterisation, and suggest the interpretability of ordered abelian groups which are not strongly dependent as a new (not yet fully satisfactory) conjectural division line.

If time allows we will draw from the classification of strongly dependent ordered abelian groups some conclusions concerning strongly dependent henselian fields (e.g., if K is strongly dependent then any henselian valuation v – not necessarily definable – on K has strongly dependent residue field and value group).

The talk will aim to be, more or less, self-contained and little use (if any) will be made of technical model theoretic terms.

Based (mostly) on joint work with Yatir Halevi.

Over the course of the last 15 years or so, Minhyong Kim has developed a method for making effective use of the fundamental group to bound sets of solutions to hyperbolic equations; his method opens a new avenue in the quest for an effective version of the Mordell conjecture. But although Kim’s approach has led to the construction of explicit bounds in special cases, the problem of realizing the potential effectivity of his methods remains a difficult and beautiful open problem. In the case of the unit equation, this problem may be approached via ``motivic’’ methods. Using these methods we are able to describe an algorithm; its output upon halting is provably the set of integral points, while its halting depends on conjectures. This will be a colloquium-version of a talk that I gave at the algebraic geometry seminar here in November of 2015.

Bekka has defined a notion of property (T) for C-algebras that is congruous with property (T) groups in the sense that any C-completion of the complex group ring has property (T) if and only if the group does. We will outline the fairly straightforward proof of this fact, as well as discuss some ideas that Joav Orovitz and I have for “generalizing” property (T) for C*-algebras so that the analogous statement is true for groupoids and completions of their convolution algebras.