Pure Math Grad Colloquium

Luke MacLean, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"The Fundamentals of Computability Theory"

The basic question of computability theory is to determine which sets of natural numbers are computable. Through coding methods, most structures including functions, sequences, etc. can be coded as sets of natural numbers, so we can further ask whether many such things are computable. However the computable ones themselves are not that interesting, so we often deal with things that are uncomputable and ask how far the structure is from being computable.

In this talk basic concepts and results will be discussed such as the halting set, Turing degrees, and much more time permitting. Basically I just want people to have some idea of what I'm talking about and what I do.

All Pure Math grad students will receive an invitation to this talk. Please contact Hayley Reid (hm2reid@uwaterloo.ca) is you are not a Pure Math grad student and would like to attend.