Centenary of the Borel Conjecture

Book excerpt: Borel's Conjecture entered the mathematics arena in 1919 as an innocuous remark about sets of real numbers in the context of a new covering property introduced by Émile Borel. In the 100 years since, this conjecture has led to a remarkably rich adventure of discovery in mathematics, producing independent results and the discovery of countable support iterated forcing, developments in infinitary game theory, deep connections with infinitary Ramsey Theory, and significant impact on the study of topological groups and topological covering properties. The papers in this volume present a broad introduction to the frontiers of research that has been spurred on by Borel's 1919 conjecture and identify fundamental unanswered research problems in the field. Philosophers of science and historians of mathematics can glean from this collection some of the typical trends in the discovery, innovation, and development of mathematical theories.