We take a look at structures that consist of a field together with finitely many distinguished field automorphisms required to commute. The theory of fields with one distinguished automorphism has a model companion known as ACFA, which Z. Chatzidakis and E. Hrushovski have studied in depth. However, Hrushovski has proved that if you look at fields with two or more commuting automorphisms, then the existentially closed models of the theory do not form a first order model class. This leads us to investigate them within a non-elementary framework. One way […]

The class of NSOP_1 theories contains the simple theories and many interesting non-simple theories, such as the omega-free PAC fields or generic vector spaces with a non-degenerate bilinear form. With Itay Kaplan, we introduced Kim-independence which agrees with non-forking independence within the simple theories and shares many of its nice properties within the simple NSOP_1 context. One very basic roadblock in lifting simplicity theory to the NSOP_1 setting, however, was transitivity: a free extension of a free extension should still be a free extension. This is almost immediate for non-forking […]

Inspired by the model theoretic study of profinite groups, we discuss the foundations of a model theoretic approach to proalgebraic groups. Our axiomatization is based on the tannakian philosophy. Through a tensor analog of skeletal categories we are able to consider neutral tannakian categories with a fibre functor as many-sorted first order structures. The theory of a diagonalizable proalgebraic group is well understood. It is determined by the theory of the base field and the theory of its character group. This is joint work with Anand Pillay.