Speaker Bio: Matthew Foreman is a set theorist at University of California, Irvine. He has made contributions in widely varying areas of set theory, including descriptive set theory, forcing, and infinitary combinatorics. Foreman earned his PhD in 1980 at University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Robert M. Solovay, with a dissertation on Large Cardinals and Model Theoretic Transfer Properties.

Abstract: You can't square the circle! The square root of 2 can't be written as a fraction! The integral of e^{-x^2} can't be written in closed form! Bitcoin is unbreakable! Most of mathematics is about finding solutions to problems or approximating them well. But there is an important collection of results that show certain tasks are mathematically impossible. This talk explains what that means, and the varying notions of impossibility.