English

Reverse Mathematics of the uncountability of $\mathbb{R}$

Logic 2022-04-22 v2

Abstract

In his first set theory paper (1874), Cantor establishes the uncountability of R\mathbb{R}. We study the latter in Kohlenbach's higher-order Reverse Mathematics, motivated by the observation that one cannot study concepts like `arbitrary mappings from R\mathbb{R} to N\mathbb{N}' in second-order Reverse Mathematics. Now, it was recently shown that the following statement:  NIN: there is no injection from [0,1] to N, \text{ NIN: there is no injection from $[0,1]$ to $\mathbb{N}$,} is hard to prove in terms of conventional comprehension. In this paper, we show that NIN is robust by establishing equivalences between NIN and NIN restricted to mainstream function classes, like: bounded variation, semi-continuity, and Borel. Thus, the aforementioned hardness of NIN is not due to the quantification over arbitrary RN\mathbb{R}\rightarrow \mathbb{N}-functions in NIN. Finally, we also study NBI, the restriction of NIN to bijections, and the connection to Cousin's lemma and Jordan's decomposition theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.05292,
  title  = {Reverse Mathematics of the uncountability of $\mathbb{R}$},
  author = {Sam Sanders},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.05292},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

14 pages, to appear in Springer LNCS, proceedings of CiE2022