Measuring the classification difficulty of countable torsion-free Abelian groups. (Q1414995)

This article is about the classification problem of countable torsion-free Abelian groups and, in fact, corresponds to a talk held at the Abelian Group conference in Honolulu. The author first elaborates on the various possibilities for a reasonable definition of classification. He has in mind something like the Ulm invariants for countable Abelian \(p\)-groups or Baer's classification for torsion-free Abelian groups of rank one by types, i.e. a complete classification by some class of invariants. Let \(\mathbf{Ab}\) be the class of Abelian groups. Then \(\mathbf{Ab}\) is as a closed subset of a Polish space itself a Polish space, in the subspace topology. The same holds for the class \(\mathbf{TFA}\) (\(\mathbf{TFA}_n\)) of all torsion-free Abelian groups of finite rank (of rank \(n\) for \(n\in\mathbb{N}\)). Recall that a function \(f\colon X\to Y\) between two Polish spaces \(X\) and \(Y\) is Borel if for any open set \(O\) we have that \(f^{-1}[O]\) is Borel. Using this notation two equivalence relations \(E\) and \(F\) on two Polish spaces \(X\) and \(Y\) satisfy \(E\leq_BF\) if there is a Borel function \(f\colon X\to Y\) such that for all \(x_1,x_2\in X\) we have \(x_1Ex_2\) if and only if \(f(x_1)Ff(x_2)\). In other words , for any \(x\in X\), the \(F\)-equivalence class \([f(x)]_F\) of \(f(x)\) is a complete invariant for \([x]_E\). For instance, Simon Thomas proved \(\cong|_{\mathbf{TFA}_n}<_B\cong|_{\mathbf{TFA}_{n+1}}\), hence the difficulty of classification for finite rank torsion-free Abelian groups increases with the rank. The author now discusses the classification problem using certain equivalence relations \(F_n\) for \(n\in\mathbb{N}\) which in some sense extend Baer's classification. The equivalence classes of \(F_n\) correspond to elements of \({\mathcal P}_{\aleph_0}(\cdots({\mathcal P}_{\aleph_0}(\mathbb{N})\cdots)\). Results due to Friedman-Stanley and the author show that for every \(n\) we have \(F_n\leq_B \cong|_{\mathbf{TFA}}\) but \(F_n<_BF_{n+1}\) and therefore classification of torsion-free groups of countable rank is even more complicated. Finally, the author discusses a possible way of classification for \(\mathbf{TFA}\) using countable languages and universal isomorphism invariants and poses at the end the conjecture that for any countable language \(L\), \(\cong|_{\text{Mod}(L)}\) can be reduced to \(\cong|_{\mathbf{TFA}}\).