1,953 research outputs found
Infinity
This essay surveys the different types of infinity that occur in pure and applied mathematics, with emphasis on: 1. the contrast between potential infinity and actual infinity; 2. Cantor's distinction between transfinite sets and absolute infinity; 3. the constructivist view of infinite quantifiers and the meaning of constructive proof; 4. the concept of feasibility and the philosophical problems surrounding feasible arithmetic; 5. Zeno's paradoxes and modern paradoxes of physical infinity involving supertasks
The univalence axiom for elegant Reedy presheaves
We show that Voevodsky's univalence axiom for intensional type theory is
valid in categories of simplicial presheaves on elegant Reedy categories. In
addition to diagrams on inverse categories, as considered in previous work of
the author, this includes bisimplicial sets and -spaces. This has
potential applications to the study of homotopical models for higher
categories.Comment: 25 pages; v2: final version, to appear in HH
Hilbert's Program Then and Now
Hilbert's program was an ambitious and wide-ranging project in the philosophy
and foundations of mathematics. In order to "dispose of the foundational
questions in mathematics once and for all, "Hilbert proposed a two-pronged
approach in 1921: first, classical mathematics should be formalized in
axiomatic systems; second, using only restricted, "finitary" means, one should
give proofs of the consistency of these axiomatic systems. Although Godel's
incompleteness theorems show that the program as originally conceived cannot be
carried out, it had many partial successes, and generated important advances in
logical theory and meta-theory, both at the time and since. The article
discusses the historical background and development of Hilbert's program, its
philosophical underpinnings and consequences, and its subsequent development
and influences since the 1930s.Comment: 43 page
Infinite time Turing machines and an application to the hierarchy of equivalence relations on the reals
We describe the basic theory of infinite time Turing machines and some recent
developments, including the infinite time degree theory, infinite time
complexity theory, and infinite time computable model theory. We focus
particularly on the application of infinite time Turing machines to the
analysis of the hierarchy of equivalence relations on the reals, in analogy
with the theory arising from Borel reducibility. We define a notion of infinite
time reducibility, which lifts much of the Borel theory into the class
in a satisfying way.Comment: Submitted to the Effective Mathematics of the Uncountable Conference,
200
Iterated reflection principles over full disquotational truth
Iterated reflection principles have been employed extensively to unfold
epistemic commitments that are incurred by accepting a mathematical theory.
Recently this has been applied to theories of truth. The idea is to start with
a collection of Tarski-biconditionals and arrive by finitely iterated
reflection at strong compositional truth theories. In the context of classical
logic it is incoherent to adopt an initial truth theory in which A and 'A is
true' are inter-derivable. In this article we show how in the context of a
weaker logic, which we call Basic De Morgan Logic, we can coherently start with
such a fully disquotational truth theory and arrive at a strong compositional
truth theory by applying a natural uniform reflection principle a finite number
of times
Generalized Effective Reducibility
We introduce two notions of effective reducibility for set-theoretical
statements, based on computability with Ordinal Turing Machines (OTMs), one of
which resembles Turing reducibility while the other is modelled after Weihrauch
reducibility. We give sample applications by showing that certain (algebraic)
constructions are not effective in the OTM-sense and considerung the effective
equivalence of various versions of the axiom of choice
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