English

On the computational properties of ambivalent sets and functions

Logic 2026-02-06 v1

Abstract

Examples of discontinuous functions already appear in the work of Euler, Abel, Dirichlet, Fourier, and Bolzano. A ground-breaking discovery due to Baire was that many discontinuous functions are well-behaved in that they are the pointwise limit of a sequence of continuous functions; the latter form a class nowadays simply called `Baire 1'. We shall study a class strictly between the semi-continuous and Baire 1 functions, called the ambivalent fuctions. In particular, we investigate the computational properties of the class of ambivalent functions and sets, denoted Δ\bf \Delta, working with Kleene's S1-S9 schemes. Computational equivalences for various standard operations (supremum, Baire 1 representation, \dots) on Δ\bf \Delta are established, including the structure functional ΩΔ\Omega_{\bf \Delta} that decides if a given ambivalent set is non-empty. A selector is shown to be computable relative to ΩΔ\Omega_{\bf \Delta} and Kleene's quantifier 2\exists^{2}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.05620,
  title  = {On the computational properties of ambivalent sets and functions},
  author = {Dag Normann and Sam Sanders},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05620},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2401.09053

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:37:50.106Z