We survey the history of Shelah’s conjecture on strongly dependent fields, give an equivalent formulation in terms of a classification of strongly dependent fields and prove that the conjecture implies that every strongly dependent field has finite dp-rank.

We study the algebraic implications of the non-independence property and variants thereof on infinite fields, motivated by the conjecture that all such fields which are neither real closed nor separably closed admit a henselian valuation. Our results mainly focus on Hahn fields and build up on Will Johnson’s “The canonical topology on dp-minimal fields” :1850007, 2018).

We initiate the study of definable [Formula: see text]-topologies and show that there is at most one such [Formula: see text]-topology on a [Formula: see text]-henselian NIP field. Equivalently, we show that if [Formula: see text] is a bi-valued NIP field with [Formula: see text] henselian, then [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are comparable. As a consequence, Shelah’s conjecture for NIP fields implies the henselianity conjecture for NIP fields. Furthermore, the latter conjecture is proved for any field admitting (...) a henselian valuation with a dp-minimal residue field. We conclude by showing that Shelah’s conjecture is equivalent to the statement that any NIP field not contained in the algebraic closure of a finite field is [Formula: see text]-henselian. (shrink)

Let K be an NIP field and let v be a Henselian valuation on K. We ask whether [Formula: see text] is NIP as a valued field. By a result of Shelah, we know that if v is externally definable, then [Formula: see text] is NIP. Using the definability of the canonical p-Henselian valuation, we show that whenever the residue field of v is not separably closed, then v is externally definable. In the case of separably closed residue field, we (...) show that [Formula: see text] is NIP as a pure valued field. (shrink)