Coarse groups, and the isomorphism problem for oligomorphic groups

Let [Formula: see text] denote the topological group of permutations of the natural numbers. A closed subgroup [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] is called oligomorphic if for each [Formula: see text], its natural action on [Formula: see text]-tuples of natural numbers has only finitely many orbits. We study the complexity of the topological isomorphism relation on the oligomorphic subgroups of [Formula: see text] in the setting of Borel reducibility between equivalence relations on Polish spaces. Given a closed subgroup [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text], the coarse group [Formula: see text] is the structure with domain the cosets of open subgroups of [Formula: see text], and a ternary relation [Formula: see text]. This structure derived from [Formula: see text] was introduced in [A. Kechris, A. Nies and K. Tent, The complexity of topological group isomorphism, J. Symbolic Logic 83(3) (2018) 1190–1203, Sec. 3.3]. If [Formula: see text] has only countably many open subgroups, then [Formula: see text] is a countable structure. Coarse groups form our main tool in studying such closed subgroups of [Formula: see text]. We axiomatize them abstractly as structures with a ternary relation. For the oligomorphic groups, and also the profinite groups, we set up a Stone-type duality between the groups and the corresponding coarse groups. In particular, we can recover an isomorphic copy of [Formula: see text] from its coarse group in a Borel fashion. We use this duality to show that the isomorphism relation for oligomorphic subgroups of [Formula: see text] is Borel reducible to a Borel equivalence relation with all classes countable. We show that the same upper bound applies to the larger class of closed subgroups of [Formula: see text] that are topologically isomorphic to oligomorphic groups.

A descriptive Main Gap Theorem

Answering one of the main questions of [S.-D. Friedman, T. Hyttinen and V. Kulikov, Generalized descriptive set theory and classification theory, Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 230(1081) (2014) 80, Chap. 7], we show that there is a tight connection between the depth of a classifiable shallow theory [Formula: see text] and the Borel rank of the isomorphism relation [Formula: see text] on its models of size [Formula: see text], for [Formula: see text] any cardinal satisfying [Formula: see text]. This is achieved by establishing a link between said rank and the [Formula: see text]-Scott height of the [Formula: see text]-sized models of [Formula: see text], and yields to the following descriptive set-theoretical analog of Shelah’s Main Gap Theorem: Given a countable complete first-order theory [Formula: see text], either [Formula: see text] is Borel with a countable Borel rank (i.e. very simple, given that the length of the relevant Borel hierarchy is [Formula: see text]), or it is not Borel at all. The dividing line between the two situations is the same as in Shelah’s theorem, namely that of classifiable shallow theories. We also provide a Borel reducibility version of the above theorem, discuss some limitations to the possible (Borel) complexities of [Formula: see text], and provide a characterization of categoricity of [Formula: see text] in terms of the descriptive set-theoretical complexity of [Formula: see text].

THE QUANDARY OF QUANDLES: A BOREL COMPLETE KNOT INVARIANT

We show that the isomorphism problems for left distributive algebras, racks, quandles and kei are as complex as possible in the sense of Borel reducibility. These algebraic structures are important for their connections with the theory of knots, links and braids. In particular, Joyce showed that a quandle can be associated with any knot, and this serves as a complete invariant for tame knots. However, such a classification of tame knots heuristically seemed to be unsatisfactory, due to the apparent difficulty of the quandle isomorphism problem. Our result confirms this view, showing that, from a set-theoretic perspective, classifying tame knots by quandles replaces one problem with (a special case of) a much harder problem.

THE COMPLEXITY OF TOPOLOGICAL GROUP ISOMORPHISM

We study the complexity of the topological isomorphism relation for various classes of closed subgroups of the group of permutations of the natural numbers. We use the setting of Borel reducibility between equivalence relations on Borel spaces. For profinite, locally compact, and Roelcke precompact groups, we show that the complexity is the same as the one of countable graph isomorphism. For oligomorphic groups, we merely establish this as an upper bound.

ON EQUIVALENCE RELATIONS GENERATED BY SCHAUDER BASES

In this article, a notion of Schauder equivalence relation ℝℕ/L is introduced, where L is a linear subspace of ℝℕ and the unit vectors form a Schauder basis of L. The main theorem is to show that the following conditions are equivalent:(1) the unit vector basis is boundedly complete;(2) L is a Fσ in ℝℕ;(3) ℝℕ/L is Borel reducible to ℓ∞.We show that any Schauder equivalence relation generalized by a basis of ℓ2 is Borel bireducible to ℝℕ/ℓ2 itself, but it is not true for bases of c0 or ℓ1. Furthermore, among all Schauder equivalence relations generated by sequences in c0, we find the minimum and the maximum elements with respect to Borel reducibility.

On Borel complexity of the isomorphism problems for graph related classes of Lie algebras and finite p-groups

We reduce the isomorphism problem for undirected graphs without loops to the isomorphism problems for some class of finite-dimensional 2-step nilpotent Lie algebras over a field and for some class of finite p-groups. We show that the isomorphism problem for graphs is harder than the two latter isomorphism problems in the sense of Borel reducibility. A computable analogue of Borel reducibility was introduced by S. Coskey, J. D. Hamkins, and R. Miller (2012). A relation of the isomorphism problem for undirected graphs to the well-known problem of classifying pairs of matrices over a field (up to similarity) is also studied.