Previous Special Year Seminar

We discuss some recent progress on the model-theoretic problem of classifying the reducts of the complex field (with named parameters and up to interdefinability). The tools we use include Castle’s recent solution of the Restricted Trichotomy...

The Bowen-Ruelle conjecture predicts that geodesic flows on negatively curved manifolds are exponentially mixing with respect to all their equilibrium states. In a breakthrough in '98, Dolgopyat pioneered a method rooted in the thermodynamic...

A conjecture of Erdős states that for every large enough prime q, every reduced residue class modulo q is the product of two primes less than q. I will discuss my on-going work with Kaisa Matomäki establishing among other things a ternary variant of...

Diophantine approximation deals with quantitative and qualitative aspects of approximating numbers by rationals. A major breakthrough by Kleinbock and Margulis in 1998 was to study Diophantine approximations for manifolds using homogeneous dynamics...

We will survey general definitions and facts about ultrafilters, and how the algebraic operations on the integers extend to the space of ultrafilters. We will also discuss some applications in combinatorial number theory and ergodic theory.

If a set of integers is syndetic (finitely many translates cover the integers), must it contain two integers whose ratio is a square?  No one knows.  In the broader context of the disjointness between additive and multiplicative configurations and...

A discrete subgroup of PSL(2,C) is called a Kleinian group. I will present  a criterion on  when a discrete faithful representation of a Kleinian group into PSL(2,C) is a conjugation, or equivalently  a criterion on when an equivariant embedding of...

The goal of this learning seminar is to explain some of the core model theoretic notions which are behind Tao’s algebraic regularity lemma about definable graphs in finite fields (Tao 2012).

We will assume minimal knowledge of model theory and...