LIFE AT FIELDS
50 Years of Set
Theory in Toronto
May 13 - 17, 2019 • Fields Institute
Organizers: Franklin Tall, Stevo Todorcevic,
and William Weiss (University of Toronto),
Menachem Magidor (The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem), Ilijas Farah, Juris Steprans and
Paul Szeptycki (York University)
A conference celebrating the 50th Anniversary of
the Toronto Set Theory Seminar was held at the
Fields Institute, May 13-17, 2019. The seminar
was started by Frank Tall in 1969 and has been
attended by faculty at both the University of Toronto
and York University since its inception. Many of
the seminar’s graduates and postdoctoral fellows
have gone on to hold positions on Mathematical
Sciences faculties across Canada and abroad.
69 registered participants from 20 countries
attended the 50th Anniversary conference.
There were 21 invited speakers who covered
a wide range of topics in set theory and its
applications. In addition to the pure set theory
topics, including infinitary combinatorics, forcing,
cardinal characteristics of the continuum, and
reflection, discussion also included applications of
set theory like topology and functional analysis.
Both survey papers and new results were
presented. All speakers had a strong connection
to the seminar as either graduates, postdoctoral
fellows, long-term and/or frequent visitors. They
came from Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech
Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, Mexico,
Poland, Singapore, and the United States. The
16
conference was opened and closed by two seminar
veterans: István Juhász of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences, and Menachem Magidor (former
President) of Hebrew University, respectively.
A noteworthy new speaker, Osvaldo Guzmán, a
Mexican postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Toronto, was this year awarded the Mary Ellen
Rudin Young Researcher Award for emerging
researchers in topology and related fields. This
was the third time since the prize’s inception six
years ago that a seminar graduate or postdoctoral
fellow has been awarded the honour.
Many speakers praised the friendly, collaborative
atmosphere of the seminar, and this atmosphere
was evident at the conference. Keith Devlin, well-
known for his expository work in mathematics, had
spent time in the Seminar in the 1970s. He regaled
attendees with stories of his interactions with
television, government and business, emphasizing
the usefulness far from academia of ideas from
mathematical logic. He also delivered a thoughtful
public address, sponsored by the Fields Institute and
the Royal Canadian Institute, calling for rethinking
how mathematics is taught in school, given that
computation can be mainly left to machines.