Seminar series
Date
Thu, 21 Feb 2019
17:00
Location
L5
Speaker
David Evans
Organisation
Imperial College, London

If G is a topological group, a G-flow X is a non-empty, compact, Hausdorff space on which G acts continuously; it is minimal if all G-orbits are dense. By a theorem of Ellis, there is a (unique) minimal G-flow M(G) which is universal: there is a continuous G-map to every other G-flow. 

Here, we will be interested in the case where G = Aut(K) for some structure K, usually omega-categorical. Work of Kechris, Pestov and Todorcevic and others gives conditions on K under which structural Ramsey Theory (due to Nesetril - Rodl and others) can be used to compute M(G). 

In the first part of the talk I will give a description of the above theory and when it applies (the 'tame case'). In the second part, I will describe joint work with J. Hubicka and J. Nesetril which shows that the omega-categorical structures constructed in the late 1980's by Hrushovski as counterexamples to Lachlan's conjecture are not tame and moreover, minimal flows of their automorphism groups have rather different properties to those in the tame case. 

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