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Andrew Brooke-Taylor
Braid groups, self-distributivity, and very strong large cardinal axioms
Abstract:
It is only a decade since it was discovered that braid groups are orderable.
The original proof of this fact relies on understanding systems with a
(left) self-distributive operation, and in particular the fact that the word
problem for such systems is decidable. To obtain this latter result,
examples of such systems without cycles were needed; these examples were
originally furnished by the assumption of certain (very) large cardinal
axioms. I will go over these matters at a fairly rudimentary level.
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