The bounding, splitting and almost disjoint families are some of the well studied infinitary combinatorial objects on the real line. Their study has prompted the development of many interesting forcing techniques. Among those are the method of creature forcing, as well as Shelah’s template iteration techniques.

In this talk, we will discuss some recent developments of Shelah’s template iteration methods, leading to models in which the bounding, the splitting and the almost disjointness numbers can be quite arbitrary. We will conclude with a brief discussion of open problems.

Slides