Welcome to my personal space

I'm currently writing up a PhD thesis at the mathematical logic group of Bonn. My Doktorvater is Prof. Peter Koepke.

office: Endenicher Allee 60, room 402, tel: +49 (0) 228 73 3791
mailing address: Endenicher Allee 60, D-53115 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: dimitri at math dot uni-bonn dot de

Wednesday 27 February 2008

research update

Last semester I've learned a bit more of fine structure theory from Peter Koepke's lecture and the next I'll be employed for the graduate seminar which will focus on fine structure theory. Still though I am reading more about Radin forcing whilst trying to finish what I hope to be an entire chapter in my PhD thesis. It's going to be an analysis of the consistency strengths of as much higher choiceless Chang's conjectures I possibly can (and it seems there will be at least a narrow gap between the upper and lower bound for most of them). Last summer I have read and almost entirely understood Gitik's paper "All uncountable cardinals can be singular", a very interesting and involved construction indeed.

In general, I do set theory without choice, and in particular infinitary combinatorics and large cardinals without choice. As Mitchell Spector says in his "Ultrapowers without the axiom of choice", most set theorists strongly prefer working with choice when dealing with large cardinals because of the importance of the ultrapower construction and the fact that the fundamental theorem for these constructions fails without DC. Many of the symmetric models I work with satisfy DC and more. For me the ones that don't are a welcome challenge.