Forking and independence in o-minimal theories

Abstract

In the following we try to answer a simple question, “what does forking look like in an o-minimal theory”, or more generally, “what kinds of notions of independence with what kinds of properties are admissible in an o-minimal theory?” The motivation of these question begin with the study of simple theories and generalizations of simple theories. In [3] Kim and Pillay prove that the class of simple theories may be described exactly as those theories bearing a notion of independence satisfying various axioms. Thus it is natural to ask, if we weaken the assumptions as to which axioms must hold, what kind of theories do we get? Another source of motivation, also stemming from the study of simple theories, comes from the work of Shelah in [8] and [7]. Here Shelah addresses a “classification” type problem for class of models of a theory, showing that a theory will have the appropriate “structure” type property if one can construct a partially ordered set, satisfying various properties, of models of the theory. Using this criterion Shelah shows that the class of simple theories has this “structure” property, yet also that several non-simple examples do as well (though it should be pointed out that o-minimal theories can not be among these since any theory with the strict order property will have the corresponding “non-structure” property [8]). Thus one is lead to ask, what are the non-simple theories meeting this criterion, and one is once again led to study the types of independence relation a theory might bear. Finally, Shelah in [6] provides some possible definitions of what axioms for a notion of independence one should possibly look for in order to hope that theories bearing such a notion of independence should be amenable closer analysis. In studying all of the above mentioned situations it readily becomes clear that dividing and forking play a central role in all of them, even though we are no longer dealing with the simple case where we know that dividing and forking are very well behaved. All of these considerations lead one to look for classes of non-simple theories of which something is known where one can construct interesting notions of independence and consequently also say something about the nature of forking and dividing in these contexts. Given this one is naturally lead to one of the most well behaved classes of non-simple theories, namely the o-minimal theories.