Descriptive Set Theory and Its Applications

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A fundamental question that arises in many fields of mathematics is that of classifying a given collection of objects under study. This amounts to providing a "catalog" or "listing" of these objects, in principle not unlike that of cataloging species in biology or stars and galaxies in astronomy. If such a classification is possible, one has a "complete" understanding of the mathematical structures involved. Otherwise a more or less "chaotic" behavior is expected. It is thus very important to understand under what circumstances a classification is possible. This difficult foundational question is further complicated by the fact that what constitutes an acceptable classification is very much dependent on the particular field of mathematics studied, so the criteria for a "good" classification in one area might not be appropriate in another. At its basic level, this project aims to develop a general quantitative theory, which in many situations can precisely measure the complexity of a classification problem and thus provide objective means by which one can decide, in any given field, whether a satisfactory classification of the objects in question is possible. Developments arising in this program often lead to the study of the symmetries of various mathematical structures and their dynamics as well as connections to areas of discrete mathematics, dynamical systems or probability and this is another important aspect of this project. In addition the project also provides research training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. The general aim of this project is the development of the theory of definable actions of Polish groups, the structure and classification of their orbit spaces, and the closely related study of definable equivalence relations and graphs. This work is motivated by basic foundational questions, like understanding the nature of complete classification of mathematical objects, up to some notion of equivalence, by invariants, and creating a mathematical framework for measuring the complexity of such classification problems. This theory is developed within the context of descriptive set theory which provides the basic underlying concepts and methods. On the other hand, in view of its broad scope, it has natural interactions with many other areas of mathematics, such as model theory, group theory, topological dynamics, ergodic theory, probability theory and combinatorics. Within this general program Kechris proposes to study: (i) the theory of countable Borel equivalence relations; (ii) descriptive aspects of the global theory of measure preserving group actions and equivalence relations; (iii) descriptive graph combinatorics, including its relation to ergodic theory, geometric group theory and probability theory; (iv) classification problems for Polish non-archimedean groups; and (v) dynamics of Polish groups.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.