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 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 develop a new method for constructing hyperimmune minimal degrees and construct an ANR degree which is a minimal cover of a minimal degree.

We prove that for any computably enumerable degree c, if it is cappable in the computably enumerable degrees, then there is a d.c.e. degree d such that c d = 0′ and c ∩ d = 0. Consequently, a computably enumerable degree is cappable if and only if it can be complemented by a nonzero d.c.e. degree. This gives a new characterization of the cappable degrees.

We provide three new results about interpolating 2-r.e. or 2-REA degrees between given r.e. degrees: Proposition 1.13. If c h are r.e. , c is low and h is high, then there is an a h which is REA in c but not r.e. Theorem 2.1. For all high r.e. degrees h g there is a properly d-r.e. degree a such that h a g and a is r.e. in h . Theorem 3.1. There is an incomplete nonrecursive r.e. A (...) such that every set REA in A and recursive in 0′ is of r. e. degree. The first proof is a variation on the construction of Soare and Stob . The second combines highness with a modified version of the proof strategy of Cooper et al. . The third theorem is a rather surprising result with a somewhat unusual proof strategy. Its proof is a 0‴ argument that at times moves left in the tree so that the accessible nodes are not linearly ordered at each stage. Thus the construction lacks a true path in the usual sense. Two substitute notions fill this role: The true nodes are the leftmost ones accessible infinitely often; the semitrue nodes are the leftmost ones such that there are infinitely many stages at which some extension is accessible. Another unusual feature of the construction is that it involves using distinct priority orderings to control the interactions of different parts of the construction. (shrink)