Logic Seminar

The first interesting case of a non-trivial, metrizable universal minimal flow (UMF) of a Polish group was computed by Pestov who proved that the UMF of the homeomorphism group of the circle is the circle itself. This naturally led to the question whether a similar result is true for homeomorphism groups of other manifolds (or more general topological spaces). A few years later, Uspenskij proved that the action of a group on its UMF is never 3-transitive, thus giving a negative answer to the question for a vast collection of topological spaces. Still, the question of metrizability of their UMFs remained open and he asked specifically whether the UMF of the homeomorphism group of the Hilbert cube is metrizable. We give a negative answer to this question for the Hilbert cube and all closed manifolds of dimension at least 2, thus showing that metrizability of the UMF of a homeomorphism group is essentially a one-dimensional phenomenon. This is joint work with Yonatan Gutman and Andy Zucker.