The survey contains a detailed discussion of methods and results in the new emerging area of online “punctual” structure theory. We also state several open problems.

We survey the history of Shelah’s conjecture on strongly dependent fields, give an equivalent formulation in terms of a classification of strongly dependent fields and prove that the conjecture implies that every strongly dependent field has finite dp-rank.

By considering the new notion of the inverses of syllogisms such as Barbara and Celarent, we show how the rule of Indirect Proof, in the form (no multiple or vacuous discharges) used by Aristotle, may be dispensed with, in a system comprising four basic rules of subalternation or conversion and six basic syllogisms.

We show that if $(M,{ \in _1},{ \in _2})$ satisfies the first-order Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms of set theory when the membership relation is ${ \in _1}$ and also when the membership relation is ${ \in _2}$, and in both cases the formulas are allowed to contain both ${ \in _1}$ and ${ \in _2}$, then $\left( {M, \in _1 } \right) \cong \left( {M, \in _2 } \right)$, and the isomorphism is definable in $(M,{ \in _1},{ \in _2})$. This extends Zermelo’s 1930 theorem in [6].