Caltech Home > PMA Home > Calendar > Logic Seminar
open search form
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Logic Seminar

Thompson's group F is not strongly amenable
Pooya Vahidi Ferdowsi, Mathematics Department, California Institute of Technology,
It is an old question whether Thompson's group F is amenable or not. To prove that F is not amenable, we can show that F is not Liouville for any generating measure on F. By looking at its action on the set of dyadic rationals, one can show that for finitely supported generating measures, F is not Liouville, which could be a first step in proving that F is not amenable. There is a subclass of amenable groups, called strongly amenable groups. These are the groups for which every proximal action on a compact Hausdorff space has a fixed point. We can modify the usual action of F on dyadic rationals to prove that F is not strongly amenable.
For more information, please contact Mathematics Department by phone at 4335 or by email at [email protected].