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                   THE FIELDS 
                    INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES 
                    20th 
                    ANNIVERSARY 
                    YEAR  
                     
                     
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                          July-December 
                          2012  
                          Thematic Program on Forcing and its Applications 
                           
                          Organizers 
                          Andreas Blass (U. Michigan), Alan Dow (U. North Carolina, 
                          Charlotte), 
                          Justin Tatch Moore (Cornell), Juris Steprans (York U.), 
                          Stevo Todorcevic (U. Toronto) 
                          Scientific 
                          advisory committee  
                          Andreas Blass (Michigan, Ann Arbor), Sy-David Friedman 
                          (Kurt Gödel Research Center),  
                          Alexander S. Kechris (California Institute of Technology), 
                          Menachem Magidor (Hebrew Univ.),  
                          Saharon Shelah (Hebrew Univ. & Rutgers Univ.), Jouko 
                          Väänänen (Univ. of Amsterdam & Helsinki) 
                           
                          W. Hugh Woodin (UC, Berkeley)  
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                               Award 
                                #1162052  
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            Mailing List : To receive 
              updates on the program please subscribe to our mailing list at www.fields.utoronto.ca/maillist 
            
            Outline of Scientific Activities
             
              The semester will starts with a week-long summer school. The 
                activities during the summer school include mini-courses and lectures 
                designed to prepare the students and other participants for the 
                semester.  
             
            Seminars
             
               The program will also include a weekly seminar. This will be 
                a continuation of the weekly Toronto Set Theory seminar, currently 
                meeting at the Fields Institute  
             
            Graduate courses  
              (starting the week of Sept. 17)
             
              Course on Forcing 
                 
                Alan Dow (UNC Charlotte) 
                 
                Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. 
                Stewart Library 
                This will be a basic Forcing course directed towards graduate 
                students and non-experts which will still reach a reasonable level 
                of sophistication in designing forcing notions. An emphasis will 
                be placed on examples and on the methodology of designing the 
                forcings themselves rather than the formal and rigorous development 
                of the logical underpinnings of forcing. 
               
                 New 
                  -Updated notes for the course for Sept 25 and Sept 27 
                  Paper 
                  on discussion about the Kunen and Miller results for the Cohen 
                  model. 
                  Notes from October 2 
               
               
               
              Course on Large Cardinals 
              Paul Larson (Miami University) 
               
              Tentatively Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. 
              Stewart Library  
              Large cardinal axioms, also known as the axioms of the higher infinite, 
              posit cardinals that prescribe their own transcendence over smaller 
              cardinals and provide a superstructure for the analysis of strong 
              propositions in set theory. They form an essentially linear hierarchy 
              reaching up to inconsistent extensions of motivating concepts. This 
              course will focus on the most fundamental large cardinal notions, 
              emphasizing their inter-relationship with combinatorics and with 
              forcing techniques. 
            Taking the Institute's Courses for Credit  
              As graduate students at any of the Institute's University Partners, 
              you may discuss the possibility of obtaining a credit for one or 
              more courses in this series with your home university graduate officer 
              and the course instructor. Assigned reading and related projects 
              may be arranged for the benefit of students requiring these courses 
              for credit.  
            Workshops
             September 8-9, 2012 
              Appalachian Set Theory Workshop 
               
              C*-algebras, classification and descriptive set theory 
              Fields Institute 
              September 10-14, 2012 
                Workshop on Applications to Operator 
                Algebras 
                Organizers: Ilijas Farah, Andrew Toms, Alexander S. Kechris 
                This workshop will explore connections between set theory and 
                C*-algebras, as well as the emerging connections with von Neumann 
                algebras. Some long-standing problems from the theory of C*-algebras 
                were recently solved by using increasingly sophisticated set-theoretic 
                tools. Emphasis will be put on applications of forcing to still 
                unsolved problems, such as the general Stone-Weierstrass problem 
                or the consistency of a positive answer to Naimark's problem. 
                Part of the workshop will be devoted to the emerging connections 
                between the classication problems in operator algebras and the 
                abstract classication program in descriptive set theory. 
              October 22-26, 2012 
                Workshop on Forcing Axioms and their 
                Applications. 
                Organizers: Jordi Lopez Abad, Justin Tatch Moore, Stevo Todorcevic 
                This workshop will bring together researchers working on combinatorial 
                analysis of Banach spaces and those specializing in forcing axioms. 
                Central to the discussion will be combinatorial consequences of 
                Martin's Maximum which are driven by applications and which are 
                readily accessible to those working in analysis and other fields. 
                The driving goal will be to progress our understanding in well 
                known open problems in the the theory of Banach space such as 
                the metrization problem for compact convex sets, the smooth bump 
                problem, and the separable quotient problem. 
              November 12-16, 2012 
                Workshop on Iterated Forcing and 
                Large Cardinals 
                Organizers: Michal Hrusak, Paul Larson, Saharon Shelah, W. Hugh 
                Woodin 
                This workshop will focus on preservation theorems for iterated 
                forcing constructions. The goal is to better understand when iterated 
                forcing constructions preserve the Continuum Hypothesis and its 
                strengthenings and also certain inequalities of cardinal invariants 
                of the continuum. An additional focus will be to attempt to better 
                understand the relationship between Woodin's Pmax-machinery and 
                more conventional iterated forcing constructions. Work of Shelah 
                and Woodin already hints that large cardinals will likely play 
                a role in studying when reals are added in iterated forcing constructions. 
               
             
            Distinguished and Coxeter Lecturers 
             
               November 7-9, 2012,  
                Distinguished Lecture Series  
                Matthew D. Foreman, University of California, Irvine 
             
             Postdoctoral Fellows and Program Visitors
            The Thematic Program on Forcing and its Applications 
              is pleased to welcome the following Postdoctoral 
              Fellows to the Program.  
               
             
               
                 
                  
                     
                      
            | Fields Postdoctoral Fellows  | 
                     
                     
                      
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               David Chodounsky, PhD (Charles University in Prague, 2011) 
                Miguel Angel Mota, PhD (University of Barcelona, 2009) 
                Tristan Bice, PhD (Kobe University, 2012) 
                 
               
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            Trevor Wilson, PhD (University 
              of California, Berkeley, 2012) 
              Sean Cox, PhD (University of California, Irvine, 2009) 
              Brent Cody, PhD (City University of New York Graduate Center, 2011) | 
                     
                   
                 
               
             
            All scientific events are open to the mathematical sciences community. 
              Visitors who areinterested in office space or funding are 
              requested to apply by filling out the application form (now closed). 
              Additional support is available (pending NSF funding) to support 
              junior US visitors to this program.  
              Fields scientific programs are devoted to research in the mathematical 
              sciences, and enhanced graduate and post-doctoral training opportunities. 
              Part of the mandate of the Institute is to broaden and enlarge the 
              community, and to encourage the participation of women and members 
              of visible minority groups in our scientific programs.  
             
             
              
                 
                 
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