The occasion of a retiring presidential address seems like a time to look back, take stock and perhaps look ahead.Institutionally, it was an honor to serve as President of the Association and I want to thank my teachers and predecessors for guidance and advice and my fellow officers and our publisher for their work and support. To all of the members who answered my calls to chair or serve on this or that committee, I offer my thanks as well. Your (...) work was both needed and appreciated.A major component of the efforts of the Association is devoted to our publications. My first important task as President was to deal with the need to reorganize the reviews section of the JSL and eventually to move it to the BSL. Appropriately enough, my first administrative job for the Association, some thirty years ago, was to serve on a committee to plan a reorganization of the reviews. I thank all those who helped with this transition and who took over the task of running the new reviews section. I hope that it will be another thirty years before further major changes are needed in this area and that someone else will be making them. (shrink)

We affirm a conjecture of Sacks [1972] by showing that every countable distributive lattice is isomorphic to an initial segment of the hyperdegrees, $\scr{D}_{h}$ . In fact, we prove that every sublattice of any hyperarithmetic lattice (and so, in particular, every countable, locally finite lattice) is isomorphic to an initial segment of $\scr{D}_{h}$ . Corollaries include the decidability of the two quantifier theory of $\scr{D}_{h}$ and the undecidability of its three quantifier theory. The key tool in the proof is a (...) new lattice representation theorem that provides a notion of forcing for which we can prove a version of the fusion lemma in the hyperarithmetic setting and so the preservation of $\omega _{1}^{CK}$ . Somewhat surprisingly, the set theoretic analog of this forcing does not preserve ω₁. On the other hand, we construct countable lattices that are not isomorphic to any initial segment of $\scr{D}_{h}$. (shrink)

We prove a number of structural theorems about the honest polynomial m-degrees contingent on the assumption P = NP . In particular, we show that if P = NP , then the topped finite initial segments of Hm are exactly the topped finite distributive lattices, the topped initial segments of Hm are exactly the direct limits of ascending sequences of finite distributive lattices, and all recursively presentable distributive lattices are initial segments of Hm ∩ RE. Additionally, assuming ¦∑¦ = 1, (...) we show that the theory of the hpm-degrees is undecidable. We also show that index sets cannot be minimal. Lastly, we examine an alternative definition of honest m-reduction under which recursive minimal sets can be constructed. (shrink)

We prove that every countable jump upper semilattice can be embedded in.

We describe the important role that the conjectures and questions posed at the end of the two editions of Gerald Sacks's Degrees of Unsolvability have had in the development of recursion theory over the past thirty years.

We show the decidability of the existential theory of the recursively enumerable degrees in the language of Turing reducibility, Turing reducibility of the Turing jumps, and least and greatest element.

Skvortsova showed that there is a factor of the Medvedev lattice which captures intuitionistic propositional logic (IPC). However, her factor is unnatural in the sense that it is constructed in an ad hoc manner. We present a more natural example of such a factor. We also show that the theory of every non-trivial factor of the Medvedev lattice is contained in Jankov’s logic, the deductive closure of IPC plus the weak law of the excluded middle $${\neg p \vee \neg \neg (...) p}$$. This answers a question by Sorbi and Terwijn. (shrink)