The Alfred Tarski Lectures
Following the death of Group founder Alfred Tarski in 1983, an endowment fund was established in his memory. Using income from this fund, a series of annual Alfred Tarski Lectures was inaugurated in 1989. Each spring an outstanding scholar in a field to which Tarski contributed is selected to come to Berkeley to meet with faculty and students and to deliver several lectures. (List of past Tarski lectures.)
The Twenty-first Annual Alfred Tarski Lectures
Anand Pillay
Professor of Mathematical Logic, University of Leeds
Swanlund Chair and Professor Emeritus,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Download slides from the lectures
Compact Spaces, Definability, and Measures, in Model Theory
The themes of the lecture series include: What compact spaces can be intrinsically attached to a first-order theory? What mathematical objects such as manifolds, Lie groups, can be recovered from a first-order theory? To what extend can the theory of (Haar) measure and integration, be lifted from the category of locally compact spaces to the category of definable sets in a given theory.
The Logic Topology
Monday, April 6, 2009
4:10 p.m.
60 Evans Hall
We introduce first-order theories, concentrating on their “type spaces”. We discuss various notions of definable set, and define the “logic topology” on suitable definable sets.
Lie Groups from Nonstandard Models
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
4:10 p.m.
Room to be announced
We discuss various kinds of standard part or reduction maps in the light of the logic topology, and relate model-theoretic standard part maps for definable groups to algebraic geometric reduction maps in the case of elliptic curves.
Measures and Domination
Friday, April 10, 2008
4:10 p.m.
60 Evans Hall
We introduce Keisler measures on definable sets, and in suitable contexts generalize uniqeness of Haar measure on compact groups, to definable groups, using the Vapnik-Chervonenkis theorem from learning theory/probability theory.