Colloquium Announcement
Department of Mathematics
West Virginia University

for

Thursday, February 19, 1998, at 3:45pm in 324 Armstrong Hall

(Tea and cookies begin at 3:00 in coffee room.)

Professor Piotr Koszmider

Ohio University, Athens, and Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brasil


Beyond the method of transfinite induction.
Stepping-up infinite constructions.

The talk will be suitable for a general audience.

Students are strongly encouraged to participate.

Abstract



The method of transfinite induction is used in classical settings when one wants to build an infinite (uncountable) structure. But what if the method is useless due to the fact that we do not know how to handle large initial fragments of the inductive construction? Then, various, so called, stepping-up tools can be employed. They are sophisticated set-theoretic structures which replace the ordinals along which the usual induction is being perfored. We will tell stories about recent uses of such techniques in various branches of mathematics. Discused results will be concerned with uncountable constructions of topological spaces, Boolean algebras, Banach spaces etc.


The information on the future (and past) Colloquia can be also found on web at the address:

http://www.math.wvu.edu/homepages/kcies/colloquium.html