1,358 research outputs found
What we talk about when we talk about numbers
In this paper, I describe and motivate a new species of mathematical structuralism, which I call Instrumental Nominalism about Set-Theoretic Structuralism. As the name suggests, this approach takes standard Set-Theoretic Structuralism of the sort championed by Bourbaki and removes its ontological commitments by taking an instrumental nominalist approach to that ontology of the sort described by Joseph Melia and Gideon Rosen. I argue that this avoids all of the problems that plague other versions of structuralism
Integrals and Valuations
We construct a homeomorphism between the compact regular locale of integrals
on a Riesz space and the locale of (valuations) on its spectrum. In fact, we
construct two geometric theories and show that they are biinterpretable. The
constructions are elementary and tightly connected to the Riesz space
structure.Comment: Submitted for publication 15/05/0
Linear logic for constructive mathematics
We show that numerous distinctive concepts of constructive mathematics arise
automatically from an interpretation of "linear higher-order logic" into
intuitionistic higher-order logic via a Chu construction. This includes
apartness relations, complemented subsets, anti-subgroups and anti-ideals,
strict and non-strict order pairs, cut-valued metrics, and apartness spaces. We
also explain the constructive bifurcation of classical concepts using the
choice between multiplicative and additive linear connectives. Linear logic
thus systematically "constructivizes" classical definitions and deals
automatically with the resulting bookkeeping, and could potentially be used
directly as a basis for constructive mathematics in place of intuitionistic
logic.Comment: 39 page
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
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