Building on Pierre Simon’s notion of distality, we introduce distality rank as a property of first-order theories and give examples for each rank m such that $1\leq m \leq \omega $ . For NIP theories, we show that distality rank is invariant under base change. We also define a generalization of type orthogonality called m-determinacy and show that theories of distality rank m require certain products to be m-determined. Furthermore, for NIP theories, this behavior characterizes m-distality. If we narrow the scope to stable theories, we observe that m-distality can be characterized by the maximum cycle size found in the forking “geometry,” so it coincides with $(m-1)$ -triviality. On a broader scale, we see that m-distality is a strengthening of Saharon Shelah’s notion of m-dependence.

For an infinite cardinal ${\it\kappa}$, let $\text{ded}\,{\it\kappa}$ denote the supremum of the number of Dedekind cuts in linear orders of size ${\it\kappa}$. It is known that ${\it\kappa}<\text{ded}\,{\it\kappa}\leqslant 2^{{\it\kappa}}$ for all ${\it\kappa}$ and that $\text{ded}\,{\it\kappa}<2^{{\it\kappa}}$ is consistent for any ${\it\kappa}$ of uncountable cofinality. We prove however that $2^{{\it\kappa}}\leqslant \text{ded}(\text{ded}(\text{ded}(\text{ded}\,{\it\kappa})))$ always holds. Using this result we calculate the Hanf numbers for the existence of two-cardinal models with arbitrarily large gaps and for the existence of arbitrarily large models omitting a type in the class of countable dependent first-order theories. Specifically, we show that these bounds are as large as in the class of all countable theories.

In the first part we show a counterexample to a conjecture by Shelah regarding the existence of indiscernible sequences in dependent theories (up to the first inaccessible cardinal). In the second part we discuss generic pairs, and give an example where the pair is not dependent. Then we define the notion of directionality which deals with counting the number of coheirs of a type and we give examples of the different possibilities. Then we discuss nonsplintering, an interesting notion that appears in the work of Rami Grossberg, Andrés Villaveces and Monica VanDieren, and we show that it is not trivial (in the sense that it can be different than splitting) whenever the directionality of the theory is not small. In the appendix we study dense types in RCF.

We provide a general theorem implying that for a (strongly) dependent theory T the theory of sufficiently well-behaved pairs of models of T is again (strongly) dependent. We apply the theorem to the case of lovely pairs of thorn-rank one theories as well as to a setting of dense pairs of first-order topological theories.