We prove first-order definability of the prime subring inside polynomial rings, whose coefficient rings are (commutative unital) reduced and indecomposable. This is achieved by means of a uniform formula in the language of rings with signature $(0,1,+,\cdot )$. In the characteristic zero case, the claim implies that the full theory is undecidable, for rings of the referred type. This extends a series of results by Raphael Robinson, holding for certain polynomial integral domains, to a more general class.

We set up a general context in which one can prove Sauer–Shelah type lemmas. We apply our general results to answer a question of Bhaskar [1] and give a slight improvement to a result of Malliaris and Terry [7]. We also prove a new Sauer–Shelah type lemma in the context of $ \operatorname {\textrm{op}}$ -rank, a notion of Guingona and Hill [4].

We consider the structures $(\mathbb {Z}; \mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Z}})$ , $(\mathbb {Z}; <, \mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Z}})$ , $(\mathbb {Q}; \mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Q}})$ , and $(\mathbb {Q}; <, \mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Q}})$ where $\mathbb {Z}$ is the additive group of integers, $\mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Z}}$ is the set of $a \in \mathbb {Z}$ such that $v_{p}(a) < 2$ for  every prime p and corresponding p-adic valuation $v_{p}$ , $\mathbb {Q}$ and $\mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Q}}$ are defined likewise for rational numbers, and $<$ denotes the natural ordering on each of these domains. We prove that the second structure is model-theoretically wild while the other three structures are model-theoretically tame. Moreover, all these results can be seen as examples where number-theoretic randomness yields model-theoretic consequences.

Drawing on the analogy between any unary first-order quantifier and a “face operator,” this paper establishes several connections between model theory and homotopy theory. The concept of simplicial set is brought into play to describe the formulae of any first-order language L, the definable subsets of any L-structure, as well as the type spaces of any theory expressed in L. An adjunction result is then proved between the category of o-minimal structures and a subcategory of the category of linearly ordered simplicial sets with distinguished vertices.

Consider a definably complete uniformly locally o-minimal expansion of the second kind of a densely linearly ordered abelian group. Let $f:X \rightarrow R^n$ be a definable map, where X is a definable set and R is the universe of the structure. We demonstrate the inequality $\dim (f(X)) \leq \dim (X)$ in this paper. As a corollary, we get that the set of the points at which f is discontinuous is of dimension smaller than $\dim (X)$. We also show that the structure is definably Baire in the course of the proof of the inequality.

Answering a question of Cifú Lopes, we give a syntactic characterization of those continuous sentences that are preserved under reduced products of metric structures. In fact, we settle this question in the wider context of general structures as introduced by the second author.

We give a short proof of the fundamental theorem of central element theory (see: Sanchez Terraf and Vaggione, Varieties with definable factor congruences, T.A.M.S. 361). The original proof is constructive and very involved and relies strongly on the fact that the class be a variety. Here we give a more direct nonconstructive proof which applies for the more general case of a first-order class which is both closed under the formation of direct products and direct factors.

Our main result is that there exist structures which cannot be computably recovered from their tree of tuples. This implies that there are structures with no computable copies which nevertheless cannot code any information in a natural/functorial way.

In connection with the work of Anscombe, Macpherson, Steinhorn and the present author in [1] we investigate the notion of a multidimensional exact class (R-mec), a special kind of multidimensional asymptotic class (R-mac) with measuring functions that yield the exact sizes of definable sets, not just approximations. We use results about smooth approximation [24] and Lie coordinatization [13] to prove the following result (Theorem 4.6.4), as conjectured by Macpherson: For any countable language $\mathcal {L}$ and any positive integer d the class $\mathcal {C}(\mathcal {L},d)$ of all finite $\mathcal {L}$-structures with at most d 4-types is a polynomial exact class in $\mathcal {L}$, where a polynomial exact class is a multidimensional exact class with polynomial measuring functions.

Skolem (1956) studied the germs at infinity of the smallest class of real valued functions on the positive real line containing the constant $1$ , the identity function ${\mathbf {x}}$ , and such that whenever f and g are in the set, $f+g,fg$ and $f^g$ are in the set. This set of germs is well ordered and Skolem conjectured that its order type is epsilon-zero. Van den Dries and Levitz (1984) computed the order type of the fragment below $2^{2^{\mathbf {x}}}$ . Here we prove that the set of asymptotic classes within any Archimedean class of Skolem functions has order type $\omega $ . As a consequence we obtain, for each positive integer n, an upper bound for the fragment below $2^{n^{\mathbf {x}}}$ . We deduce an epsilon-zero upper bound for the fragment below $2^{{\mathbf {x}}^{\mathbf {x}}}$ , improving the previous epsilon-omega bound by Levitz (1978). A novel feature of our approach is the use of Conway’s surreal number for asymptotic calculations.

Given a regular cardinal $\kappa $ such that $\kappa ^{<\kappa }=\kappa $ (or any regular $\kappa $ if the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis holds), we study a class of toposes with enough points, the $\kappa $ -separable toposes. These are equivalent to sheaf toposes over a site with $\kappa $ -small limits that has at most $\kappa $ many objects and morphisms, the (basis for the) topology being generated by at most $\kappa $ many covering families, and that satisfy a further exactness property T. We prove that these toposes have enough $\kappa $ -points, that is, points whose inverse image preserve all $\kappa $ -small limits. This generalizes the separable toposes of Makkai and Reyes, that are a particular case when $\kappa =\omega $ , when property T is trivially satisfied. This result is essentially a completeness theorem for a certain infinitary logic that we call $\kappa $ -geometric, where conjunctions of less than $\kappa $ formulas and existential quantification on less than $\kappa $ many variables is allowed. We prove that $\kappa $ -geometric theories have a $\kappa $ -classifying topos having property T, the universal property being that models of the theory in a Grothendieck topos with property T correspond to $\kappa $ -geometric morphisms (geometric morphisms the inverse image of which preserves all $\kappa $ -small limits) into that topos. Moreover, we prove that $\kappa $ -separable toposes occur as the $\kappa $ -classifying toposes of $\kappa $ -geometric theories of at most $\kappa $ many axioms in canonical form, and that every such $\kappa $ -classifying topos is $\kappa $ -separable. Finally, we consider the case when $\kappa $ is weakly compact and study the $\kappa $ -classifying topos of a $\kappa $ -coherent theory (with at most $\kappa $ many axioms), that is, a theory where only disjunction of less than $\kappa $ formulas are allowed, obtaining a version of Deligne’s theorem for $\kappa $ -coherent toposes from which we can derive, among other things, Karp’s completeness theorem for infinitary classical logic.

We calculate the complexity of Scott sentences of scattered linear orders. Given a countable scattered linear order L of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ we show that it has a ${d\text {-}\Sigma _{2\alpha +1}}$ Scott sentence. It follows from results of Ash [2] that for every countable $\alpha $ there is a linear order whose optimal Scott sentence has this complexity. Therefore, our bounds are tight. We furthermore show that every Hausdorff rank 1 linear order has an optimal ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ or ${d\text {-}\Sigma ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ Scott sentence and give a characterization of those linear orders of rank $1$ with ${\Pi ^{\mathrm {c}}_{3}}$ optimal Scott sentences. At last we show that for all countable $\alpha $ the class of Hausdorff rank $\alpha $ linear orders is $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }_{2\alpha +2}$ complete and obtain analogous results for index sets of computable linear orders.

In this paper, we present a version of Fraïssé theory for categories of metric structures. Using this version, we show that every UHF algebra can be recognized as a Fraïssé limit of a class of C*-algebras of matrix-valued continuous functions on cubes with distinguished traces. We also give an alternative proof of the fact that the Jiang–Su algebra is the unique simple monotracial C*-algebra among all the inductive limits of prime dimension drop algebras.

We shall define a general notion of dimension, and study groups and rings whose interpretable sets carry such a dimension. In particular, we deduce chain conditions for groups, definability results for fields and domains, and show that a pseudofinite $\widetilde {\mathfrak M}_c$ -group of finite positive dimension contains a finite-by-abelian subgroup of positive dimension, and a pseudofinite group of dimension 2 contains a soluble subgroup of dimension 2.

In this paper we study a notion of HL-extension (HL standing for Herwig–Lascar) for a structure in a finite relational language $\mathcal {L}$ . We give a description of all finite minimal HL-extensions of a given finite $\mathcal {L}$ -structure. In addition, we study a group-theoretic property considered by Herwig–Lascar and show that it is closed under taking free products. We also introduce notions of coherent extensions and ultraextensive $\mathcal {L}$ -structures and show that every countable $\mathcal {L}$ -structure can be extended to a countable ultraextensive structure. Finally, it follows from our results that the automorphism group of any countable ultraextensive $\mathcal {L}$ -structure has a dense locally finite subgroup.

We investigate, in ZFC, the behavior of abstract elementary classes (AECs) categorical in many successive small cardinals. We prove for example that a universal $\mathbb {L}_{\omega _1, \omega }$ sentence categorical on an end segment of cardinals below $\beth _\omega $ must be categorical also everywhere above $\beth _\omega $ . This is done without any additional model-theoretic hypotheses (such as amalgamation or arbitrarily large models) and generalizes to the much broader framework of tame AECs with weak amalgamation and coherent sequences.

Quantum set theory (QST) and topos quantum theory (TQT) are two long running projects in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) that share a great deal of conceptual and technical affinity. Most pertinently, both approaches attempt to resolve some of the conceptual difficulties surrounding QM by reformulating parts of the theory inside of nonclassical mathematical universes, albeit with very different internal logics. We call such mathematical universes, together with those mathematical and logical structures within them that are pertinent to the physical interpretation, ‘Q-worlds’. Here, we provide a unifying framework that allows us to (i) better understand the relationship between different Q-worlds, and (ii) define a general method for transferring concepts and results between TQT and QST, thereby significantly increasing the expressive power of both approaches. Along the way, we develop a novel connection to paraconsistent logic and introduce a new class of structures that have significant implications for recent work on paraconsistent set theory.

We prove Bogolyubov–Ruzsa-type results for finite subsets of groups with small tripling, |A3| ≤ O(|A|), or small alternation, |AA−1A| ≤ O(|A|). As applications, we obtain a qualitative analogue of Bogolyubov’s lemma for dense sets in arbitrary finite groups, as well as a quantitative arithmetic regularity lemma for sets of bounded VC-dimension in finite groups of bounded exponent. The latter result generalizes the abelian case, due to Alon, Fox and Zhao, and gives a quantitative version of previous work of the author, Pillay and Terry.

Many phenomena in geometry and analysis can be explained via the theory of $D$-modules, but this theory explains close to nothing in the non-archimedean case, by the absence of integration by parts. Hence there is a need to look for alternatives. A central example of a notion based on the theory of $D$-modules is the notion of holonomic distributions. We study two recent alternatives of this notion in the context of distributions on non-archimedean local fields, namely $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$-class distributions from Cluckers et al. [‘Distributions and wave front sets in the uniform nonarchimedean setting’, Trans. Lond. Math. Soc.5(1) (2018), 97–131] and WF-holonomicity from Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)]. We answer a question from Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)] by showing that each distribution of the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$-class is WF-holonomic and thus provides a framework of WF-holonomic distributions, which is stable under taking Fourier transforms. This is interesting because the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$-class contains many natural distributions, in particular, the distributions studied by Aizenbud and Drinfeld [‘The wave front set of the Fourier transform of algebraic measures’, Israel J. Math.207(2) (2015), 527–580 (English)]. We show also another stability result of this class, namely, one can regularize distributions without leaving the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$-class. We strengthen a link from Cluckers et al. [‘Distributions and wave front sets in the uniform nonarchimedean setting’, Trans. Lond. Math. Soc.5(1) (2018), 97–131] between zero loci and smooth loci for functions and distributions of the $\mathscr{C}^{\text{exp}}$-class. A key ingredient is a new resolution result for subanalytic functions (by alterations), based on embedded resolution for analytic functions and model theory.

We give an exposition of the compactness of $L({Q^{\mathrm{\,cf}}\!\!\!\!\!\!}_{C})$ , for any set C of regular cardinals.