§1. Introduction. I dedicate this essay to the two-dozen-odd people whose refutations of Cantor's diagonal argument (I mean the one proving that the set of real numbers and the set of natural numbers have different cardinalities) have come to me either as referee or as editor in the last twenty years or so. Sadly these submissions were all quite unpublishable; I sent them back with what I hope were helpful comments. A few years ago it occurred to me to wonder why so many people devote so much energy to refuting this harmless little argument—what had it done to make them angry with it? So I started to keep notes of these papers, in the hope that some pattern would emerge.

These pages report the results. They might be useful for editors faced with similar problem papers, or even for the authors of the papers themselves. But the main message to reach me is that there are several points of basic elementary logic that we usually teach and explain very badly, or not at all.

In 1995 an engineer named William Dilworth, who had published a refutation of Cantor's argument in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, sued for libel a mathematician named Underwood Dudley who had called him a crank ([9] pp. 44f, 354).

§1. Introduction. In this report we wish to describe recent work on a class of first order theories first introduced by Shelah in [32], the simple theories. Major progress was made in the first author's doctoral thesis [17]. We will give a survey of this, as well as further works by the authors and others.

The class of simple theories includes stable theories, but also many more, such as the theory of the random graph. Moreover, many of the theories of particular algebraic structures which have been studied recently (pseudofinite fields, algebraically closed fields with a generic automorphism, smoothly approximable structures) turn out to be simple. The interest is basically that a large amount of the machinery of stability theory, invented by Shelah, is valid in the broader class of simple theories. Stable theories will be defined formally in the next section. An exhaustive study of them is carried out in [33]. Without trying to read Shelah's mind, we feel comfortable in saying that the importance of stability for Shelah lay partly in the fact that an unstable theory T has 2λ many models in any cardinal λ ≥ ω1 + |T| (proved by Shelah). (Note that for λ ≥ |T| 2λ is the maximum possible number of models of cardinality λ.)

The purpose of this communication is to survey a theory of liftings, as developed in author's thesis ([8]). The first result in this area was Shelah's construction of a model of set theory in which every automorphism of P(ℕ)/ Fin, where Fin is the ideal of finite sets, is trivial, or inother words, it is induced by a function mapping integers into integers ([33]). (It is a classical result of W. Rudin [31] that under the Continuum Hypothesis there are automorphisms other than trivial ones.) Soon afterwards, Velickovic ([47]), was able to extract from Shelah's argument the fact that every automorphism of P(ℕ)/ Fin with a Baire-measurable lifting has to be trivial. This, for instance, implies that in Solovay's model ([36]) all automorphisms are trivial. Later on, an axiomatic approach was adopted and Shelah's conclusion was drawn first from the Proper Forcing Axiom (PFA) ([34]) and then from the milder Open Coloring Axiom (OCA) and Martin's Axiom (MA) ([48], see §5 for definitions). Both shifts from the quotient P(ℕ)/ Fin to quotients over more general ideals P(ℕ)/I and from automorphisms to arbitrary ho-momorphisms were made by Just in a series of papers ([14]-[17]), motivated by some problems in algebra ([7, pp. 38–39], [43, I.12.11], [45, Q48]) and topology ([46, p. 537]).