Related papers: The Epsilon Calculus and Herbrand Complexity
Hilbert's epsilon calculus is an extension of elementary or predicate calculus by a term-forming operator $\varepsilon$ and initial formulas involving such terms. The fundamental results about the epsilon calculus are so-called epsilon…
The epsilon operator is a term-forming operator which replaces quantifiers in ordinary predicate logic. The application of this undervalued formalism has been hampered by the absence of well-behaved proof systems on the one hand, and…
Kreisel has observed that the termination proof for Hilbert's epsilon-substitution method bears a resemblance to the priority arguments used in recursion theory. We make this precise by proving the termination using a framework for priority…
Herbrand's theorem plays an important role both in proof theory and in computer science. Given a Herbrand skeleton, which is basically a number specifying the count of disjunctions of the matrix, we would like to get a computable bound on…
Some quantitative results obtained by proof mining take the form of Herbrand disjunctions that may depend on additional parameters. We attempt to elucidate this fact through an extension to first-order arithmetic of the proof of Herbrand's…
Any intermediate propositional logic (i.e., a logic including intuitionistic logic and contained in classical logic) can be extended to a calculus with epsilon- and tau-operators and critical formulas. For classical logic, this results in…
Paul Bernays and David Hilbert carefully avoided overspecification of Hilbert's epsilon-operator and axiomatized only what was relevant for their proof-theoretic investigations. Semantically, this left the epsilon-operator underspecified.…
Herbrand's theorem is often presented as a corollary of Gentzen's sharpened Hauptsatz for the classical sequent calculus. However, the midsequent gives Herbrand's theorem directly only for formulae in prenex normal form. In the Handbook of…
Herbrand's Theorem is a fundamental result in mathematical logic which provides a reduction of first-order formulas satisfied by a universal class to formulas free of existential quantifiers. In this work, a simpler and self-contained…
Herbrand's theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logic by recording the information which instances…
We consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this work we take a coarser (and…
This paper explores the connection between two central results in the proof theory of classical logic: Gentzen's cut-elimination for the sequent calculus and Herbrands "fundamental theorem". Starting from Miller's expansion-tree-proofs, a…
We investigate the elimination of quantifiers in first-order formulas via Hilbert's epsilon-operator (or -binder), following Bernays' explicit definitions of the existential and the universal quantifier symbol by means of epsilon-terms.…
The primary aim of Hilbert's proof theory was to establish the consistency of classical mathematics using finitary means only. Hilbert's strategy for doing this was to eliminate the infinite (in the form of unbounded quantifiers) from…
We study Hilbert's epsilon calculus and Hilbert's partial epsilon calculus in toposes.
In this paper we show that cut-free derivations in the epsilon format of sequent calculus provide for a non-elementary speed-up w.r.t. cut-free proofs in usual sequent calculi in first-order language.
Herbrand schemes are a method to extract Herband disjunctions directly from sequent calculus proofs, without appealing to cut elimination, using a formal grammar known as a higher-order recursion scheme. In this note, we show that the core…
The $\epsilon$-substitution method is a technique for giving consistency proofs for theories of arithmetic. We use this technique to give a proof of the consistency of the impredicative theory $ID_1$ using a variant of the cut-elimination…
Cut-elimination is the bedrock of proof theory. It is the algorithm that eliminates cuts from a sequent calculus proof that leads to cut-free calculi and applications. Cut-elimination applies to many logics irrespective of their semantics.…
Hilbert's first problem is of importance in relation to work being done in computational systems. It is the question of equipollence of natural and real numbers. By construction equipollence is established for real numbers in open interval…