Time: Thursday, March 23, 4:00-5:00pm
Place: Phillips Hall, Room 736
Speaker: Meng-Che (Turbo) Ho, California State University, Northridge
https://sites.google.com/view/turboho/homepage
Title: Classification from the point of view of logic
Abstract: Mathematical logic seeks to analyze mathematics via the application of formal logic. In many areas of mathematics, one major goal is to classify all mathematical structures of a certain kind. Naturally, logicians have tried to formalize the notion of classification.
In this talk, we will discuss how to formalize classification problems via computable structure theory and descriptive set theory. These frameworks provide ways to reduce one classification problem to another. We use such frameworks to study classification problems from group theory and prove hardness results, namely give lower bounds on the complexities of these classification problems.
This talk assumes no prior experience with Logic. Part of the talk is based on joint work with Matthew Harrison-Trainor, Julia Knight, and Russell Miller.