I will describe some recent results on the first order rigidity of homeomorphism groups of compact manifolds, and their applications to dynamics of group actions on manifolds. I will also describe how to find "syntactic" invariants of manifolds, and how these can be used to give a conjectural model-theoretic characterization of the genus of a surface. I will explain some of the details of the proof, including how homeomorphism groups of manifolds interpret second order arithmetic in a uniform manner.