English

Reducing stable forking dependence to finitely many pregeometries

Logic 2026-07-10 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We show that one of the main cases of the stable forking conjecture, stability of the forking relation over a base in a finite-rank supersimple theory, is determined by finitely many pregeometries in each rank. This case of the stable forking conjecture has long had an implicitly well-known pregeometric interpretation: there is a set of matroids Gn\mathcal{G}_{n} such that the forking instability in rank nn is equivalent to the pregeometry on some rank-one partial type (over a finite set) embedding a matroid in Gn\mathcal{G}_{n}. Our contribution is to show that this set of matroids Gn\mathcal{G}_{n}, determining based forking stability in rank nn, can be chosen to be finite. The main part of our proof was already accomplished in rank 33 by Peretz, but does not extend as stated to higher ranks (and may or may not directly extend in a weaker sense to higher ranks, by shrinking terms). However, we obtain a sufficient substitute for Peretz's work in ranks n>3n > 3: we turn Peretz's original universal result into an existence theorem. The rest of our proof refines an argument from multi-experiment parameter definability, originating from work in applied model theory by Li, Meshkat, Ovchinnikov, Pillay, Pogudin and Scanlon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.09069,
  title  = {Reducing stable forking dependence to finitely many pregeometries},
  author = {Scott Mutchnik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.09069},
  year   = {2026}
}

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33 pages