Universal countable Borel quasi-orders

In recent years, much work in descriptive set theory has been focused on the Borel complexity of naturally occurring classification problems, in particular, the study of countable Borel equivalence relations and their structure under the quasi-order of Borel reducibility. Following the approach of Louveau and Rosendal for the study of analytic equivalence relations, we study countable Borel quasi-orders. In this paper we are concerned with universal countable Borel quasi-orders, i.e. countable Borel quasi-orders above all other countable Borel quasi-orders with regard to Borel reducibility. We first establish that there is a universal countable Borel quasi-order, and then establish that several countable Borel quasi-orders are universal. An important example is an embeddability relation on descriptive set theoretic trees. Our main result states that embeddability of finitely generated groups is a universal countable Borel quasi-order, answering a question of Louveau and Rosendal. This immediately implies that biembeddability of finitely generated groups is a universal countable Borel equivalence relation. The same techniques are also used to show that embeddability of countable groups is a universal analytic quasi-order. Finally, we show that, up to Borel bireducibility, there are continuum-many distinct countable Borel quasi-orders which symmetrize to a universal countable Borel equivalence relation

The complexity of the embeddability relation between torsion-free abelian groups of uncountable size

We prove that for every uncountable cardinal $\kappa$ such that $\kappa^{<\kappa}=\kappa$, the quasi-order of embeddability on the $\kappa$-space of $\kappa$-sized graphs Borel reduces to the embeddability on the $\kappa$-space of $\kappa$-sized torsion-free abelian groups. Then we use the same techniques to prove that the former Borel reduces to the embeddability on the $\kappa$-space of $\kappa$-sized $R$-modules, for every $\mathbb{S}$-cotorsion-free ring $R$ of cardinality less than the continuum. As a consequence we get that all the previous are complete $\boldsymbol{\Sigma}^1_1$ quasi-orders.Comment: 14 pages, final versio

Universality of group embeddability

Working in the framework of Borel reducibility, we study various notions of embeddability between groups. We prove that the embeddability between countable groups, the topological embeddability between (discrete) Polish groups, and the isometric embeddability between separable groups with a bounded bi-invariant complete metric are all invariantly universal analytic quasi-orders. This strengthens some results from [Wil14] and [FLR09].Comment: Minor corrections. 15 pages, submitte

The bi-embeddability relation for finitely generated groups II

We study the isomorphism and bi-embeddability relations on the spaces of Kazhdan groups and finitely generated simple groups

Invariant universality for quandles and fields

We show that the embeddability relations for countable quandles and for countable fields of any given characteristic other than 2 are maximally complex in a strong sense: they are invariantly universal. This notion from the theory of Borel reducibility states that any analytic quasi-order on a standard Borel space essentially appears as the restriction of the embeddability relation to an isomorphism-invariant Borel set. As an intermediate step we show that the embeddability relation of countable quandles is a complete analytic quasi-order

The bi-embeddability relation for finitely generated groups

There does not exist a Borel selection of an isomorphism class within each bi-embeddability class of finitely generated groups

Uniformity, Universality, and Computability Theory

We prove a number of results motivated by global questions of uniformity in computability theory, and universality of countable Borel equivalence relations. Our main technical tool is a game for constructing functions on free products of countable groups. We begin by investigating the notion of uniform universality, first proposed by Montalb\'an, Reimann and Slaman. This notion is a strengthened form of a countable Borel equivalence relation being universal, which we conjecture is equivalent to the usual notion. With this additional uniformity hypothesis, we can answer many questions concerning how countable groups, probability measures, the subset relation, and increasing unions interact with universality. For many natural classes of countable Borel equivalence relations, we can also classify exactly which are uniformly universal. We also show the existence of refinements of Martin's ultrafilter on Turing invariant Borel sets to the invariant Borel sets of equivalence relations that are much finer than Turing equivalence. For example, we construct such an ultrafilter for the orbit equivalence relation of the shift action of the free group on countably many generators. These ultrafilters imply a number of structural properties for these equivalence relations.Comment: 61 Page

Countable Borel quasi-orders

In recent years, much work in descriptive set theory has been focused on the Borel complexity of naturally occurring classification problems, in particular, the study of countable Borel equivalence relations and their structure under the quasi-order of Borel reducibility. Following the approach of Louveau and Rosendal in cite{LR05} for the study of analytic equivalence relations, we study countable Borel quasi-orders. We are largely concerned in this thesis with universal countable Borel quasi-orders, i.e. countable Borel quasi-orders above all other countable Borel quasi-orders with regard to Borel reducibility. We first establish that there is a universal countable Borel quasi-order, using a Feldman-Moore-type result for countable Borel quasi-orders and an argument similar to that of Dougherty, Jackson, and Kechris in cite{DJK94}. We then establish that several countable Borel quasi-orders are universal. An important example is an embeddability relation on descriptive set theoretic trees. This is used in many of the other proofs of universality. Our main result is Theorem 5.5.2, which states that embeddability of finitely generated groups is a universal countable Borel quasi-order, answering a question of Louveau and Rosendal in cite{LR05}. This immediately implies that biembeddability of finitely generated groups is a universal countable Borel equivalence relation. Although it may have been possible to prove this only using results on countable Borel equivalence relations, the use of quasi-orders seems to be the most direct route to this result. The proof uses small cancellation theory. The same techniques are also used to show that embeddability of countable groups is a universal analytic quasi-order. Finally, we discuss the structure of countable Borel quasi-orders under Borel reducibility, and we present some open problems.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Jay William