Séminaires : Séminaire des Thésards

Le séminaire des thésards est l'occasion pour les doctorants de présenter des résultats et des problématiques dignes d'intérêt devant un public de non-spécialistes. L'ambiance y est informelle ; poser des questions naïves est encouragé, et les questions moins naïves sont bienvenues dans la mesure où elles n'entravent pas le bon déroulement de l'exposé.

Un jeudi sur deux à 18h00, en alternance entre Jussieu et Sophie Germain.

Since set theory was created by Cantor in the late 19th century, one of the major and most sophisticated problems in the field has been the Continuum hypothesis : There is a subset of the real line which is neither countable nor in bijection with the real line itself.

In his 1938 seminal work, K. Gödel showed that "one cannot prove that the Continuum hypothesis is wrong". On the other hand, in his revolutionnary work of 1963, which is the achievement he was awarded the Fields medal for, P. Cohen showed using the method of forcing that "no one can prove that the Continuum hypothesis is true".

Soon after, his method has been applied to other branches of mathematics to answer certain long standing open questions. The talk aim to expose the essence of Cohen's method, to give some applications in various branches of mathematics, and to demonstrate how naturally it connectes to the Baire category theorem.