Related papers: An Unusual Proof that the Reals are Uncountable
We consider decompositions of the real line into pairwise disjoint Borel pieces so that each piece is closed under addition. How many pieces can there be? We prove among others that the number of pieces is either at most 3 or uncountable,…
We describe the countable ordinals in terms of iterations of Mostowski collapsings. This gives a proof-theoretic bound of definable countable ordinals in the Zermelo-Fraenkel's set theory ZF.
The first-order theory of addition over the natural numbers, known as Presburger arithmetic, is decidable in double exponential time. Adding an uninterpreted unary predicate to the language leads to an undecidable theory. We sharpen the…
It is well known that the arithmetic nature of Mills' prime-representing constant is uncertain: we do not know if Mills' constant is a rational or irrational number. In the case of other prime-representing constants, irrationality can be…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
In this paper we prove that all irrational numbers from totally real cubic number fields are well approximable by rationals (i.e. the partial quotients in the continued fraction expansion of such a number are unbounded). This settles the…
These are the lecture notes of an introductory course on ordinal analysis. Our selection of topics is guided by the aim to give a complete and direct proof of a mathematical independence result: Kruskal's theorem for binary trees is…
The purpose of this article is to formulate a number of probabilistic hidden-variable theorems, to provide proofs in some cases, and counterexamples to some conjectured relationships. The first theorem is the fundamental one. It asserts the…
For any sufficiently strong theory of arithmetic, the set of Diophantine equations provably unsolvable in the theory is algorithmically undecidable, as a consequence of the MRDP theorem. In contrast, we show decidability of Diophantine…
What would you do if you were asked to "add" knowledge? Would you say that "one plus one knowledge" is two "knowledges"? Less than that? More? Or something in between? Adding knowledge sounds strange, but it brings to the forefront…
We present a more general proof that cyclotomic polynomials are irreducible over Q and other number fields that meet certain conditions. The proof provides a new perspective that ties together well-known results, as well as some new…
We exposit two previously unpublished theorems of Leo Harrington. The first theorem says that there exist arithmetical singletons which are arithmetically incomparable. The second theorem says that there exists a ranked point which is not…
Using the virial theorem it is shown that the hypothesis of the existence of the universal density functional is invalid.
We show that the existence of a Pi^{1}_{N}-indescribable cardinal over the Zermelo-Fraenkel's set theory ZF is proof-theoretically reducible to iterations of Mostowski collapsings and lower Mahlo operations. Furthermore we describe a…
We show that some mathematical results and their negations are both deducible. The derived contradictions indicate the inconsistency of current mathematics. This paper is an updated version of arXiv:math/0606635v3 with additional results…
In this short note I restate and simplify the proof of the impossibility of probabilistic induction from Popper (1992). Other proofs are possible (cf. Popper (1985)).
A definable pair of disjoint non-OD sets of reals (hence, indiscernible sets) exists in the Sacks and $E_0$-large generic extensions of the constructible universe $L$.
In this paper we analyze the status of some `unbelievable results' presented in the paper `On Some Contradictory Computations in Multi-Dimensional Mathematics' [1] published in Nonlinear Analysis, a journal indexed in the Science Citation…
Cox's well-known theorem justifying the use of probability is shown not to hold in finite domains. The counterexample also suggests that Cox's assumptions are insufficient to prove the result even in infinite domains. The same…
First-order logic fragments mixing quantifiers, arithmetic, and uninterpreted predicates are often undecidable, as is, for instance, Presburger arithmetic extended with a single uninterpreted unary predicate. In the SMT world, difference…