Louise Hay Logic Seminar
Ryan Carpenter
UIC
Existentialism and Model Theory, or: All Roads Lead to Zilber's Trichotomy Conjecture
Abstract: Transcendental number theory, tropical geometry, and cohomology of complex abelian varieties—to name a few—are some of the areas from which techniques are borrowed to prove existential closedness results that are active areas of research in model theory today. Such techniques (no doubt, the questions they serve to answer) might suggest a sort of existential question for the model theorist: what am I doing in the middle of all this? In this talk, I will detail the existential closedness results model theorists have cared about over the last thirty years, and then I will place these results in their proper historical context to get around to answering the model theorist's existential question.
Wednesday September 10, 2025 at 4:30 PM in 427 SEO