Gaboriau and Popa showed that a non-abelian free group on finitely many generators has continuum many measure preserving, free, ergodic, actions on standard Borel probability spaces. The original proof used the notion of property (T). I will sketch how this can be replaced by an elementary, and apparently new, dynamical property.

In the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians David Hilbert proposed a list of 23 landmark mathematical problems. The first of these problems was shown by Paul Cohen in 1963 to be undecidable—which is to say, in informal language, that it was in principle completely unsolvable. The tenth problem was shown by Yuri Matiyasevich to be unsolvable in 1970. These developments would very likely have been profoundly surprising, perhaps even disturbing, to Hilbert. I want to review some of the general history of unsolvable problems. As much as reasonably possible in the time allowed, I hope to give the audience a sense of why the appearance of unsolvable problems in mathematics was inevitable, and perhaps even desirable.