Andrew Brooke-Taylor's Research Page

Me near Cheb in the Czech Republic

My main area of interest is in set theory, specifically, large cardinal axioms and forcing. I am also very interested in connections between set theory and other fields of mathematics, especially category theory and algebraic topology, which I studied before switching to set theory.


Large cardinals and forcing

Large cardinal axioms are axioms that extend the usual (ZFC) axioms for set theory, strengthening the theory. Forcing is the standard technique for proving consistency results for other set-theoretic principles; put them together and you can address interesting questions about which strengthenings of ZFC are compatible with which other set-theoretic principles.

Papers

Expository articles

Talk slides


Applications of large cardinals in category theory

There is a significant literature using large cardinal axioms, especially Vopenka's Principle, in the study of locally presentable and accessible categories. Joan Bagaria and I have been working to advance the area making use of our set-theoretic perspective. We have already been able to extend a colimit preservation theorem of Rosicky, Trnkova and Adamek, and to simplify the proof of another colimit preservation theorem of Rosicky.

Papers

Talk slides


Fraïssé limits

With Damiano Testa I have done some work on the Fraisse limit of the class of finite simpicial complexes, and similar structures for infinite languages which behave in a "locally finite" manner. In particular we were able to show that there is a 0-1 law in this case, distinct from the known one due to Blass and Harary (it uses a different measure on the set of n-vertex simplicial complexes). However, it has recently come to our attention that the framework we developed for this is very similar to the existing one of "parametric classes", so we are reworking the paper in light of this previous work. We also show that the geometric realisation of the Fraisse limit of simplicial complexes is homeomorphic to the infinite simplex (see the first set of talk slides).

Papers

Talk slides


Other research interests

I have worked with Benedikt Loewe and Birgit Richter on the Bousfield lattice in algebraic topology, and with Sheila Miller on rank-to-rank embeddings and their implications for left self-distributive systems, but don't yet have anything to link to for those!

Miscellanea


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Last updated: 15/5/13 ([d]d/[m]m/yy)