PhD Scholarships

Swansea University is offering two PhD scholarships in Computability Theory:

• Fully Funded PhD Scholarship: Enumeration degrees and topology (RS462). Find more here.
• Fully Funded EPSRC and Swansea University PhD Scholarship: Effective dimensions: applications of computability theory to geometric measure theory (RS459). Find more here.

CCA 2024

Computability and Complexity Analysis conference is coming to Swansea next year. It will take place in Computational Foundry on 11-14 July. 

Watch this space for more updates.

Giovanni Solda visiting Swansea

Next week Giovanni Solda is visiting us from Ghent. He will give a talk on "A combinatorial principle weak over weak systems yet strong over strong systems".

Abstract:  

Better quasi orders (henceforth bqos) are a strengthening of the notion of well quasi order. Even if their definition is more complicated, the former enjoy nice closure properties that make them, in a way, easier to work with than the latter: this feature made bqos an instrumental tool in proving landmark results like Nash-Williams' theorem and Laver's theorem. From the reverse mathematical point of view, the study of bqos is an interesting area still full of open questions.
In this talk, we will focus on a property of non-bqos, the so-called minimal bad array lemma, and in particular one version of it that we will call MBA − . We will show that MBA − has a very odd behavior when it comes to its reverse-mathematical strength, namely 

• over ATR 0 , MBA − can be seen to be equivalent to the very strong principle of Π 12 -comprehension, yet
• over ACA 0 , MBA − does not imply ATR 0.
In order to prove this result, we will provide a characterization of the quasi-orders that ACA 0 proves to be bqos.

 
This is joint work with Anton Freund, Alberto Marcone, and Fedor Pakhomov.

Theory Blog is Back!

Welcome to Swansea University Theory Group's new blog. Follow us for updates!

The Swansea Theory Group is internationally renowned for its research in Logic in Computer Science. The active research areas are: Computability Theory, Computational Complexity, Proof Theory, Type Theory, Game Theory, Algorithms, Formal Methods (Automated and Interactive Theorem Proving), Cyber Security, Blockchain Technology, Verification of Railway Control Systems), Artificial Intelligence (Satisfiability Solving, Multi-agent Systems, Argumentation Theory, Trustable Machine Learning, AI and Law).

The research on Railway Control Systems has lead to the formation of the Swansea Railway Verification Group which also delivered two Impact Case Studies.

Another recently formed subgroup studies the Educational, and Historical and Philosophical Foundation of Computer Science.