Computability and analysis: the legacy of Alan Turing

We discuss the legacy of Alan Turing and his impact on computability and analysis.Comment: 49 page

On what I do not understand (and have something to say): Part I

This is a non-standard paper, containing some problems in set theory I have in various degrees been interested in. Sometimes with a discussion on what I have to say; sometimes, of what makes them interesting to me, sometimes the problems are presented with a discussion of how I have tried to solve them, and sometimes with failed tries, anecdote and opinion. So the discussion is quite personal, in other words, egocentric and somewhat accidental. As we discuss many problems, history and side references are erratic, usually kept at a minimum (``see ... '' means: see the references there and possibly the paper itself). The base were lectures in Rutgers Fall'97 and reflect my knowledge then. The other half, concentrating on model theory, will subsequently appear

W-types in setoids

W-types and their categorical analogue, initial algebras for polynomial endofunctors, are an important tool in predicative systems to replace transfinite recursion on well-orderings. Current arguments to obtain W-types in quotient completions rely on assumptions, like Uniqueness of Identity Proofs, or on constructions that involve recursion into a universe, that limit their applicability to a specific setting. We present an argument, verified in Coq, that instead uses dependent W-types in the underlying type theory to construct W-types in the setoid model. The immediate advantage is to have a proof more type-theoretic in flavour, which directly uses recursion on the underlying W-type to prove initiality. Furthermore, taking place in intensional type theory and not requiring any recursion into a universe, it may be generalised to various categorical quotient completions, with the aim of finding a uniform construction of extensional W-types.Comment: 17 pages, formalised in Coq; v2: added reference to formalisatio

Explicit Evidence Systems with Common Knowledge

Justification logics are epistemic logics that explicitly include justifications for the agents' knowledge. We develop a multi-agent justification logic with evidence terms for individual agents as well as for common knowledge. We define a Kripke-style semantics that is similar to Fitting's semantics for the Logic of Proofs LP. We show the soundness, completeness, and finite model property of our multi-agent justification logic with respect to this Kripke-style semantics. We demonstrate that our logic is a conservative extension of Yavorskaya's minimal bimodal explicit evidence logic, which is a two-agent version of LP. We discuss the relationship of our logic to the multi-agent modal logic S4 with common knowledge. Finally, we give a brief analysis of the coordinated attack problem in the newly developed language of our logic

Canonical extensions and ultraproducts of polarities

J{\'o}nsson and Tarski's notion of the perfect extension of a Boolean algebra with operators has evolved into an extensive theory of canonical extensions of lattice-based algebras. After reviewing this evolution we make two contributions. First it is shown that the failure of a variety of algebras to be closed under canonical extensions is witnessed by a particular one of its free algebras. The size of the set of generators of this algebra can be made a function of a collection of varieties and is a kind of Hanf number for canonical closure. Secondly we study the complete lattice of stable subsets of a polarity structure, and show that if a class of polarities is closed under ultraproducts, then its stable set lattices generate a variety that is closed under canonical extensions. This generalises an earlier result of the author about generation of canonically closed varieties of Boolean algebras with operators, which was in turn an abstraction of the result that a first-order definable class of Kripke frames determines a modal logic that is valid in its so-called canonical frames

A topos for algebraic quantum theory

The aim of this paper is to relate algebraic quantum mechanics to topos theory, so as to construct new foundations for quantum logic and quantum spaces. Motivated by Bohr's idea that the empirical content of quantum physics is accessible only through classical physics, we show how a C*-algebra of observables A induces a topos T(A) in which the amalgamation of all of its commutative subalgebras comprises a single commutative C*-algebra. According to the constructive Gelfand duality theorem of Banaschewski and Mulvey, the latter has an internal spectrum S(A) in T(A), which in our approach plays the role of a quantum phase space of the system. Thus we associate a locale (which is the topos-theoretical notion of a space and which intrinsically carries the intuitionistic logical structure of a Heyting algebra) to a C*-algebra (which is the noncommutative notion of a space). In this setting, states on A become probability measures (more precisely, valuations) on S(A), and self-adjoint elements of A define continuous functions (more precisely, locale maps) from S(A) to Scott's interval domain. Noting that open subsets of S(A) correspond to propositions about the system, the pairing map that assigns a (generalized) truth value to a state and a proposition assumes an extremely simple categorical form. Formulated in this way, the quantum theory defined by A is essentially turned into a classical theory, internal to the topos T(A).Comment: 52 pages, final version, to appear in Communications in Mathematical Physic