These notes grew out of a graduate course I have taught several times at Penn State. They owe a great deal to Klaus Gloede’s lecture notes for a course he taught regularly at the University of Heidelberg (I was a student in one of those courses once).
I always felt there was a ‘gap’ between the great two books on descriptive set theory, Kechris and Moschovakis. One does not address metamathematical issues at all, while the other seems a bit disconnected from the exciting new developments at the intersection of set theory, dynamical systems, and operator algebras. These notes attempt to offer a middle road, albeit on a much smaller scale.
State College, January 2025