Seminari del Dipartimento
Logica Laver tables Patrick Dehornoy 17-02-2017 - 11:30 AULA 311 (SEMINARI) Largo San L. Murialdo,1
Discovered (or invented?) by Richard Laver in the 1990s, the tables that are now known as Laver tables are finite structures obeying the self-distributivity law x(yz)=(xy)(xz). Although their construction is totally explicit, some of their combinatorial properties are (so far) established only using unprovable set theoretical axioms, a quite unusual and paradoxical situation. We shall explain the construction of Laver tables, their connection with set theory, and their potential applications in low-dimensional topology via the recent computation of some associated cocycles. |