Rahim Moosa, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo
"D-varieties and Jason Bell's Conjecture on differential ideals"
A few weeks ago Jason Bell gave a talk in this seminar on \delta-ideals in finitely generated algebras over C equipped with a C-derivation \delta. He gave a theorem and made a conjecture. In this talk I will explain how to translate between the algebraic language that Bell uses and the differential-algebraic geometric language that model theorists use. As a consequence of this translation we will see that Bell's theorem is a special case of a (very hard, unpublished) theorem of Hrushovski's from the nineties, and that his conjecture is a natural, and, as far as I can tell, open question about the model theory of differentially closed fields.