Related papers: Representations and the foundations of mathematics
To enable the study of open sets in computational approaches to mathematics, lots of extra data and structure on these sets is assumed. For both foundational and mathematical reasons, it is then a natural question, and the subject of this…
Representation theorems relate seemingly complex objects to concrete, more tractable ones. In this paper, we take advantage of the abstraction power of category theory and provide a general representation theorem for a wide class of…
There are different meanings of foundation of mathematics: philosophical, logical, and mathematical. Here foundations are considered as a theory that provides means (concepts, structures, methods etc.) for the development of whole…
A central topic in mathematical logic is the classification of theorems from mathematics in hierarchies according to their logical strength. Ideally, the place of a theorem in a hierarchy does not depend on the representation (aka coding)…
Reverse mathematics studies which subsystems of second order arithmetic are equivalent to key theorems of ordinary, non-set-theoretic mathematics. The main philosophical application of reverse mathematics proposed thus far is foundational…
Many theorems of mathematics have the form that for a certain problem, e.g. a differential equation or polynomial (in)equality, there exists a solution. The sequential version then states that for a sequence of problems, there is a sequence…
The foundations of mathematics have long been considered settled by the Zermelo-Fraenkel-Choice axioms. But set theory abounds in models with different truths and even classical questions such as the measurability of projective sets can…
The inverse problem for representation functions takes as input a triple (X,f,L), where X is a countable semigroup, f : X --> N_0 \cup {\infty} a function, L : a_1 x_1 + ... + a_h x_h an X-linear form and asks for a subset A \subseteq X…
The received Hilbert-style axiomatic foundations of mathematics has been designed by Hilbert and his followers as a tool for meta-theoretical research. Foundations of mathematics of this type fail to satisfactory perform more basic and more…
Plato is well-known in mathematics for the eponymous foundational philosophy Platonism based on ideal objects. Plato's allegory of the cave provides a powerful visual illustration of the idea that we only have access to shadows or…
I have argued elsewhere that second order logic provides a foundation for mathematics much in the same way as set theory does, despite the fact that the former is second order and the latter first order, but second order logic is marred by…
For every positive integer h, the representation function of order h associated to a subset A of the integers or, more generally, of any group or semigroup X, counts the number of ways an element of X can be written as the sum (or product,…
It is quite well-known from Kurt Godel's (1931) ground-breaking result on the Incompleteness Theorem that rudimentary relations (i.e., those definable by bounded formulae) are primitive recursive, and that primitive recursive functions are…
Hilary Putnam once suggested that "the actual existence of sets as 'intangible objects' suffers... from a generalization of a problem first pointed out by Paul Benacerraf... are sets a kind of function or are functions a sort of set?"…
This paper presents mathematics as a general science of computation in a way different from the tradition. It is based on the radical philosophical standpoint according to which the content, meaning and justification of experience lies in…
The results presented in this paper are refinements of some results presented in a previous paper. Three such refined results are presented. The first one relaxes one of the basic hypotheses assumed in the previous paper, and thus extends…
The recent trend in mathematics is towards a framework of abstract mathematical objects, rather than the more concrete approach of explicitly defining elements which objects were thought to consist of. A natural question to raise is whether…
A brief survey of some basic ideas of the so-called Idempotent Mathematics is presented; an "idempotent" version of the representation theory is discussed. The Idempotent Mathematics can be treated as a result of a dequantization of the…
We give a survey on the theory of representation-finite and certain minimal representation-infinite algebras.The main goals are the existence of multiplicative bases and of coverings with good properties. Both are attained via…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a first-order theorem prover that uses a representation of beliefs in mathematical claims to construct proofs. The inspiration for doing so comes from the practices of human mathematicians…