Logic seminar

The field of continuous combinatorics is the study of (large, dense) combinatorial structures using tools typically associated with continuous objects, such as tools from analysis, topology or measure theory. The field started under the name of "graph limits" since the main object of study were graphons, i.e., limits of graphs. Since then, several other limits have been constructed for all sorts of combinatorial objects (e.g., digraphs, hypergraphs, permutations, etc.) and even general limits were provided through the unifying theory of flag algebras.

However, the limits constructed in the theory of flag algebras are of an algebraic/syntactic nature, due to the minimalist nature of the theory (as opposed to the more semantic/geometric nature of the previous ad hoc limits of the literature). In this talk, I will present the semantic/geometric counterpart to flag algebras: the theory of theons. I will also give a couple of examples of proofs both within continuous combinatorics and... more

The decades-long practice of complexity theory and bounded arithmetic provided some strong clues for the existence of an alternative yet rich feasible world, where for instance all the functions are feasible and the polynomially and exponentially bounded sets are the new finite and infinite, respectively. The situation is similar to the so-called computable and continuous worlds whose traces first unearthed in constructive mathematics and later realized by the forcing-style model constructions that elevated to a general and conceptual theory called the topos theory. In this talk, imitating the main ideas of topos theory, we propose a program to provide a general machinery for the feasible forcing in order to prove some independence results for weak arithmetic, on the one hand and find a conceptual understanding of the low complexity computation, on the other.

As we will see, any fulfillment of that proposal needs a certain (geometric) form of structural theory and one... more