Forcing in Ramsey theory

Abstract

Ramsey theory and forcing have a symbiotic relationship. At the RIMS Symposium on Infinite Combinatorics and Forcing Theory in 2016, the author gave three tutorials on Ramsey theory in forcing. The first two tutorials concentrated on forcings which contain dense subsets forming topological Ramsey spaces. These forcings motivated the development of new Ramsey theory, which then was applied to the generic ultrafilters to obtain the precise structure Rudin-Keisler and Tukey orders below such ultrafilters. The content of the first two tutorials has appeared in an expository article submitted to the SEALS 2016 Proceedings. The third tutorial concentrated on uses of forcing to prove Ramsey theorems for trees which are applied to determine big Ramsey degrees of homogeneous relational structures. This is the focus of this paper.