Boise Set Theory Seminar, Boise, September 2016

Abstract: We summarize some of the results from Kyle Beserra’s master’s thesis. In Serre’s study of trees and their automorphisms, he observed that the automorphisms all lie in one of three classes: invert an edge, shift a bi-infinite path, or fix a subtree pointwise. But of course there are many types of automorphisms within each of these classes. So it is natural to ask just how complex is the classification of tree automorphisms? And what is the complexity of each of Serre’s three classes? We can make these questions formal using the language Borel complexity theory. In this talk we answer the question for regular trees.