Kantorovich and Livenson [6] initiated the study of infinitary Boolean operations applied to the subsets of the Baire space and related spaces. It turns out that a number of interesting collections of subsets of the Baire space, such as the collection of Borel sets of a given type (e.g. the F σ sets) or the collection of analytic sets, can be expressed as the range of an ω-ary Boolean operation applied to all possible ω-sequences of clopen sets. (Such collections are called clopen-ω-Boolean.) More recently, the ranges of I-ary Boolean operations for uncountable I have been considered; specific questions include whether the collection of Borel sets, or the collection of sets at finite levels in the Borel hierarchy, is clopen-I-Boolean.

The main purpose of this paper is to give a characterization of those collections of subsets of the Baire space (or similar spaces) that are clopen-I-Boolean for some I. The Baire space version can be stated as follows: a collection of subsets of the Baire space is clopen-I-Boolean for some I iff it is nonempty and closed downward and σ-directed upward under Wadge reducibility, and in this case we may take I = ω 2. The basic method of proof is to use discrete subsets of spaces of the form K 2 to put a number of smaller clopen-I-Boolean classes together to form a large one. The final section of the paper gives converse results indicating that, at least in some cases, ω 2 cannot be replaced by a smaller index set.

Although Church and Turing presented their path-breaking undecidability results immediately after their explication of effective decidability in 1936, it has been generally felt that these results do not have any direct bearing on ordinary mathematics but only contribute to logic, metamathematics and the theory of computability. Therefore it was such a celebrated achievement when Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970 demonstrated that the problem of the solvability of Diophantine equations is undecidable. His work was building essentially on the earlier work by Julia Robinson, Martin Davis and Hilary Putnam (1961), who had showed that the problem of solvability of exponential Diophantine equations is undecidable. One should note, however, that although it was only Matiyasevich's result which finally solved Hilbert's tenth problem, already the earlier result had provided a perfectly natural problem of ordinary number theory which is undecidable.

Nevertheless, both the set of Diophantine equations with solutions and the set of exponential Diophantine equations with solutions are still semi-decidable, that is, recursively enumerable (i.e., Σ10); if an equation in fact has a solution, this can be eventually verified. More generally, they are — as are their complements, the sets of equations with no solutions, which are Π10, — also Trial and Error decidable (Putnam [1965]), or decidable in the limit (Shoenfield [1959]), for every Δ20 set is (and conversely). This last-mentioned natural “liberalized” notion of decidability has begun more recently to play an essential role e.g., in so-called Formal Learning Theory (see e.g., Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein [1986], Kelly [1996]).

Jockusch showed that 2-generic degrees are downward dense below a 2-generic degree. That is, if a is 2-generic, and $0 < {\bf{b}} < {\bf{a}}$, then there is a 2-generic g with $0 < {\bf{g}} < {\bf{b}}.$ In the case of 1-generic degrees Kumabe, and independently Chong and Downey, constructed a minimal degree computable from a 1-generic degree. We explore the tightness of these results.

We solve a question of Barmpalias and Lewis-Pye by constructing a minimal degree computable from a weakly 2-generic one. While there have been full approximation constructions of ${\rm{\Delta }}_3^0$ minimal degrees before, our proof is rather novel since it is a computable full approximation construction where both the generic and the minimal degrees are ${\rm{\Delta }}_3^0 - {\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$.

We study a strengthening of the notion of a perfectly meager set. We say that a subset A of a perfect Polish space X is countably perfectly meager in X, if for every sequence of perfect subsets $\{P_n: n \in \mathbb N\}$ of X, there exists an $F_\sigma $ -set F in X such that $A \subseteq F$ and $F\cap P_n$ is meager in $P_n$ for each n. We give various characterizations and examples of countably perfectly meager sets. We prove that not every universally meager set is countably perfectly meager correcting an earlier result of Bartoszyński.

We explore the structural properties of the inner model L(Vδ+1) under the assumption that δ is a singular limit of Berkeley cardinals each of which is itself limit of extendible cardinals, lifting some of the main results of the theory of the axiom I0 to the level of Berkeley cardinals, the strongest known large cardinal axioms. Berkeley cardinals have been recently introduced in [1] and contradict the Axiom of Choice.1 In fact, our background theory will be ZF.

We study nonorthogonality of symmetric, regular types and show that it preserves generic stability and is an equivalence relation on the set of all generically stable, regular types. We prove that some of the nice properties from the stable context hold in general. In the case of strongly regular types we will relate to the global Rudin–Keisler order.

Let $\mathcal {I}$ be an ideal on $\omega $ . For $f,\,g\in \omega ^{\omega }$ we write $f \leq _{\mathcal {I}} g$ if $f(n) \leq g(n)$ for all $n\in \omega \setminus A$ with some $A\in \mathcal {I}$ . Moreover, we denote $\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}}=\{f\in \omega ^{\omega }: f^{-1}[\{n\}]\in \mathcal {I} \text { for every } n\in \omega \}$ (in particular, $\mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}}$ denotes the family of all finite-to-one functions).

We examine cardinal numbers $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}}))$ and $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}}\times \mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}}))$ describing the smallest sizes of unbounded from below with respect to the order $\leq _{\mathcal {I}}$ sets in $\mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}}$ and $\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}}$ , respectively. For a maximal ideal $\mathcal {I}$ , these cardinals were investigated by M. Canjar in connection with coinitial and cofinal subsets of the ultrapowers.

We show that $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathrm {Fin}})) =\mathfrak {b}$ for all ideals $\mathcal {I}$ with the Baire property and that $\aleph _1 \leq \mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}})) \leq \mathfrak {b}$ for all coanalytic weak P-ideals (this class contains all $\bf {\Pi ^0_4}$ ideals). What is more, we give examples of Borel (even $\bf {\Sigma ^0_2}$ ) ideals $\mathcal {I}$ with $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}}))=\mathfrak {b}$ as well as with $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {I}})) =\aleph _1$ .

We also study cardinals $\mathfrak {b}(\geq _{\mathcal {I}}\cap (\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {J}} \times \mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {K}}))$ describing the smallest sizes of sets in $\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {K}}$ not bounded from below with respect to the preorder $\leq _{\mathcal {I}}$ by any member of $\mathcal {D}_{\mathcal {J}}\!$ . Our research is partially motivated by the study of ideal-QN-spaces: those cardinals describe the smallest size of a space which is not ideal-QN.

It is a classic result in modal logic, often referred to as Jónsson-Tarski duality, that the category of modal algebras is dually equivalent to the category of descriptive frames. The latter are Kripke frames equipped with a Stone topology such that the binary relation is continuous. This duality generalizes the celebrated Stone duality for boolean algebras. Our goal is to generalize descriptive frames so that the topology is an arbitrary compact Hausdorff topology. For this, instead of working with the boolean algebra of clopen subsets of a Stone space, we work with the ring of continuous real-valued functions on a compact Hausdorff space. The main novelty is to define a modal operator on such a ring utilizing a continuous relation on a compact Hausdorff space.

Our starting point is the well-known Gelfand duality between the category ${\sf KHaus}$ of compact Hausdorff spaces and the category $\boldsymbol {\mathit {uba}\ell }$ of uniformly complete bounded archimedean $\ell $ -algebras. We endow a bounded archimedean $\ell $ -algebra with a modal operator, which results in the category $\boldsymbol {\mathit {mba}\ell }$ of modal bounded archimedean $\ell $ -algebras. Our main result establishes a dual adjunction between $\boldsymbol {\mathit {mba}\ell }$ and the category ${\sf KHF}$ of what we call compact Hausdorff frames; that is, Kripke frames equipped with a compact Hausdorff topology such that the binary relation is continuous. This dual adjunction restricts to a dual equivalence between ${\sf KHF}$ and the reflective subcategory $\boldsymbol {\mathit {muba}\ell }$ of $\boldsymbol {\mathit {mba}\ell }$ consisting of uniformly complete objects of $\boldsymbol {\mathit {mba}\ell }$ . This generalizes both Gelfand duality and Jónsson-Tarski duality.

We introduce the notion of ${\cal C}$-system of filters, generalizing the standard definitions of both extenders and towers of normal ideals. This provides a framework to develop the theory of extenders and towers in a more general and concise way. In this framework we investigate the topic of definability of generic large cardinals properties.

We study the complexity of isomorphism of classes of metric structures using methods from infinitary continuous logic. For Borel classes of locally compact structures, we prove that if the equivalence relation of isomorphism is potentially $\mathbf {\Sigma }^0_2$, then it is essentially countable. We also provide an equivalent model-theoretic condition that is easy to check in practice. This theorem is a common generalization of a result of Hjorth about pseudo-connected metric spaces and a result of Hjorth–Kechris about discrete structures. As a different application, we also give a new proof of Kechris’s theorem that orbit equivalence relations of actions of Polish locally compact groups are essentially countable.

We obtain a p-adic semilinear cell decomposition theorem using methods developed by Denef in [Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, vol. 369 (1986), pp. 154–166]. We also prove that any set definable with quantifiers in (0,1, +, —, λq, Pn){n∈ℕ,q∈ℚp} may be defined without quantifiers, where λq is scalar multiplication by q and Pn is a unary predicate which denotes the nonzero nth powers in the p-adic field ℚp. Such a set is called a p-adic semilinear set in this paper. Some further considerations are discussed in the last section.

Let λ be an ordinal less than or equal to an infinite cardinal κ. For S ⊂ κ, [S]λ denotes the collection of all order type λ subsets of S. A set X ⊂ [κ]λ will be called Ramsey iff there exists p ∈ [κ]κ such that either [p]λ ⊂ X or [p]λ ∩ X = ∅. The set p is called homogeneous for X.

The infinite Ramsey theorem implies that all subsets of [ω]n are Ramsey for n < ω. Using the axiom of choice, one can define a non-Ramsey subset of [ω]ω. In [GP], Galvin and Prikry showed that all Borel subsets of [ω]ω are Ramsey, where one topologizes [ω]ω as a subspace of Baire space. Silver [S] proved that analytic sets are Ramsey, and observed that this is best possible in ZFC.

When κ > ω, the assertion that all subsets of [κ]n are Ramsey is a large cardinal hypothesis equivalent to κ being weakly compact (and strongly inaccessible). Again, is not possible in ZFC to have all subsets of [κ]ω Ramsey. The analogy to the Galvin-Prikry theorem mentioned above was established by Kleinberg, extending work by Kleinberg and Shore in [KS]. The set [κ]ω is given a topology as a subspace of κω, which has the usual product topology, κ taken as discrete. It was shown that all open subsets of [κ]ω are Ramsey iff κ is a Ramsey cardinal (that is, κ → (κ)<ω).

In this note we examine the spaces [κ]λ for κ ≥ λ ≥ ω. We show that κ Ramsey implies all open subsets of [κ]λ are Ramsey for λ < κ, and that if κ is measurable, then all open subsets of [κ]κ are Ramsey. Let us remark here that we can with the same methods prove these results with “κ-Borel” in the place of “open”, where the κ-Borel sets are the smallest collection containing the opens and closed under complementation and intersections of length less than κ. Also, although here we consider just subsets of [κ]λ, it is no more difficult to show that partitions of [κ]λ into less than κ many κ-Borel sets have, under the appropriate hypothesis, size κ homogeneous sets.

In a previous paper it was shown that the system K of basic logic could be formulated in a simpler way owing to the fact that the proper ancestral could be defined in terms of the other concepts of that system. In the present paper analogous but more far-reaching results will be obtained for the system K′ of extended basic logic. In particular we will show that negation and the dual of the proper ancestral, as well as the proper ancestral itself, are definable in terms of the other concepts of K′. Hence, in order to define K′, we need to add only a single non-finitary rule to the rules used to define K. This rule was already among the rules originally used to define K′. It asserts that ‘Aa’ is in K′ if (and only if) every ‘b’ is such that ‘ab’ is in K′.

We will also show that a large class of non-finitary classes and relations are represented in K′, among which is K′ itself, just as all finitary syntactical classes and all finitary two- and three-place syntactical relations are represented in K, one of which is the finitary syntactical class K itself. The point is that K′ is adequate to handle the sort of transfinite induction that is essential in formulating K′, just as K is adequate to handle the ordinary finitary mathematical induction required in defining K′.

We prove that if holds for a singular cardinal μ, then any collection of fewer than cf(μ) stationary subsets of μ+ must reflect simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a connection between the complexity of κ-ultrafilters over a measurable cardinal κ, and the existence of ascending Rudin-Keisler chains of κ-ultrafilters and of inner models with several measurable cardinals.

If V is a model of ZFC + “There exists a measurable cardinal κ”, then V satisfies “There exists a normal κ-ultrafilter”, that is to say a “simple” κ-ultrafilter. The only known examples of “complex” κ-ultrafilters have been constructed by Kanamori [2], Ketonen [4] and Kunen (cf. [2]) with stronger hypotheses than measurability: compactness or supercompactness. Using the notions of skies and constellations defined by Kanamori [2] for the measurable case, and which witness the complexity of a κ-ultrafilter, we shall show the necessity of such assumptions, namely:

Theorem 1. If λ < κ is a strongly inaccessible cardinal, the existence of a κ-ultrafilter with more than λ constellations implies that there is an inner model with two measurable cardinals if λ = ω and λ + 1 measurable cardinals otherwise.

Theorem 2. Let θ < κ be an arbitrary ordinal. If there is a κ-ultrafilter such that the order-type of its skies is greater than ωθ, then there exists an inner model with θ + 1 measurable cardinals.

And as a corollary, we obtain:

Theorem 3. Let μ < κ be a regular cardinal. If there exists a κ-ultrafilter containing the closed-unbounded subsets of κ and {α < κ: cf(α) = μ}, then there is an inner model with two measurable cardinals if μ = ω, and μ + 1 measurable cardinals otherwise.