New Directions in Descriptive Set Theory (Q4262602)

This paper is based on the Gödel lecture given by the author at the April 1998 meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic in Toronto. It is a survey of recent results in descriptive set theory and focuses mainly on the classification of Borel and analytic equivalence relations on Polish spaces. Such equivalence relations are widespread in mathematics and can be classified using the notion of Borel reduction: this reduction can also be interpreted as a statement about the definable cardinality of the quotient space or about the complexity of the classification problem for the equivalence relation. A lot of progress has been done in the last few years in this area, and the author is one of the main contributors. After a first part where motivations and background are given, the paper deals mainly with Borel equivalence relations (especially the countable ones) and orbit equivalence relations induced by a Borel action of a Polish group. Among the latter the ones induced by the infinite symmetric group are strictly related to model theory, leading to the formulation and study of the Topological Vaught Conjecture. The survey includes references to all relevant literature (up to the 1999 result of Adams and Kechris that there are uncountably many incomparable countable Borel equivalence relations), and states some important conjectures.