Title: Distal and non-distal expansions of the reals
Speaker: Travis Nell (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)
Abstract: Pierre Simon in "Distal and non-Distal NIP Theories" isolated a class of NIP (or dependent) theories that can be considered purely unstable. For example any o-minimal theory is distal and any stable theory is non-distal. Distal theories usually include some sort of ordering. However, algebraically closed valued fields are non-distal, as the structure on the residue field is stable. The class of distal theories is not closed under reducts, but some useful consequences of distality do pass to reducts. Thus, even for a non-distal structure, the question of whether it can be expanded to a distal structure is of interest. In this talk, I will survey what is known about distality and distal expansions in the context of expansions of the reals.
