Graduate Programs      Graduate Home Ph D Programs Masters Degree Ph D Program Requirements Course Descriptions Current Courses Admissions Current Graduate Students Graduate Student Seminar SIAM Chapter Seminar Recent Graduates Incoming Students Graduate Seminar Sebastien Vasey Carnegie Mellon University Title: Schanuel's conjecture and excellence Abstract: Schanuel's conjecture is a very general statement of number theory which implies in particular that $e + \pi$ is transcendental. Excellence is a tool of model theory introduced by Saharon Shelah in 1983. Rouhgly speaking, a class of structures (like groups or fields) is excellent if any n-dimensional cube of countable structures with a corner missing can be "completed" in a unique way.In 2003, Boris Zilber used excellence to shed some light on Schanuel's conjecture: he constructed an exponential field of cardinality continuum that satisfies Schanuel's conjecture and proved that it was (in some sense) the only one. It has been conjectured that Zilber's field is isomorphic to the complex numbers, and Schanuel's conjecture would follow. This talk will attempt to give a taste of what excellence is and explain its relevance to Zilber's proof.Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2014Time: 5:30 pmLocation: Wean Hall 8220Submitted by:  Zilin Jiang