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

Computational Processes and Incompleteness

We introduce a formal definition of Wolfram's notion of computational process based on cellular automata, a physics-like model of computation. There is a natural classification of these processes into decidable, intermediate and complete. It is shown that in the context of standard finite injury priority arguments one cannot establish the existence of an intermediate computational process

The complexity of classifying separable Banach spaces up to isomorphism

It is proved that the relation of isomorphism between separable Banach spaces is a complete analytic equivalence relation, i.e., that any analytic equivalence relation Borel reduces to it. Thus, separable Banach spaces up to isomorphism provide complete invariants for a great number of mathematical structures up to their corresponding notion of isomorphism. The same is shown to hold for (1) complete separable metric spaces up to uniform homeomorphism, (2) separable Banach spaces up to Lipschitz isomorphism, and (3) up to (complemented) biembeddability, (4) Polish groups up to topological isomorphism, and (5) Schauder bases up to permutative equivalence. Some of the constructions rely on methods recently developed by S. Argyros and P. Dodos

Real Computational Universality: The Word Problem for a class of groups with infinite presentation

The word problem for discrete groups is well-known to be undecidable by a Turing Machine; more precisely, it is reducible both to and from and thus equivalent to the discrete Halting Problem. The present work introduces and studies a real extension of the word problem for a certain class of groups which are presented as quotient groups of a free group and a normal subgroup. Most important, the free group will be generated by an uncountable set of generators with index running over certain sets of real numbers. This allows to include many mathematically important groups which are not captured in the framework of the classical word problem. Our contribution extends computational group theory from the discrete to the Blum-Shub-Smale (BSS) model of real number computation. We believe this to be an interesting step towards applying BSS theory, in addition to semi-algebraic geometry, also to further areas of mathematics. The main result establishes the word problem for such groups to be not only semi-decidable (and thus reducible FROM) but also reducible TO the Halting Problem for such machines. It thus provides the first non-trivial example of a problem COMPLETE, that is, computationally universal for this model.Comment: corrected Section 4.

Invariantly universal analytic quasi-orders

We introduce the notion of an invariantly universal pair (S,E) where S is an analytic quasi-order and E \subseteq S is an analytic equivalence relation. This means that for any analytic quasi-order R there is a Borel set B invariant under E such that R is Borel bireducible with the restriction of S to B. We prove a general result giving a sufficient condition for invariant universality, and we demonstrate several applications of this theorem by showing that the phenomenon of invariant universality is widespread. In fact it occurs for a great number of complete analytic quasi-orders, arising in different areas of mathematics, when they are paired with natural equivalence relations.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Transactions of the American Mathematical Societ