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Presented By: Colloquium Series - Department of Mathematics

Colloquium Seminar: Martin's Conjecture and order-preserving functions

Patrick Lutz (Berkeley)

The field of computability theory studies the complexity of uncomputable problems. In this study, a special role is played by the Halting Problem—i.e. the problem of determining whether a given program stops after a finite number of steps or runs forever. Not only is it the first problem proved to be uncomputable, it also seems to be the simplest "natural" uncomputable problem. Martin's Conjecture is a long-standing open question in computability theory which partially explains why the Halting Problem plays such a special role. A key idea behind Martin's Conjecture is to view the Halting Problem not just as an individual problem, but as an operator on problems, which takes any problem to a strictly harder one. Martin's Conjecture consists of a classification of such operators, which says, in part, that the Halting Problem is the minimal non-trivial operator. I will discuss the background and motivation for Martin's Conjecture, as well as recent progress by Benjamin Siskind and myself which essentially completes a proof of the conjecture for a special class of operators called "order-preserving."

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