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1 vote
2 answers
340 views

Heuristic interpretations of the PA-unprovability of Goodstein's Theorem

I've relatively recently learned about Goodstein's Theorem and its unprovability in Peano arithmetic (the Kirby-Paris Theorem). I do not have any real knowledge of formal logic; but I think I've seen ...
Julian Newman's user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
334 views

Why include $0$ and $1$ in the signature of Presburger arithmetic?

I recently became interested in some problems concerning decidability of extensions of Presburger arithmetic. However, being a number-theorist rather than a logician, I am confused by some notational ...
Jakub Konieczny's user avatar
8 votes
0 answers
1k views

What's Reeb's take on naive integers?

Georges Reeb's "claim Q" is the statement that "naive integers don't fill up $\mathbb{N}$". To anyone familiar with model theory this could easily be interpreted as the existence of nonstandard models ...
Mikhail Katz's user avatar
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10 votes
4 answers
5k views

Historically first uses of mathematical induction

I'm interested in find out what were some of the first uses of mathematical induction in the literature. I am aware that in order to define addition and multiplication axiomatically, mathematical ...
user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
2k views

"Interesting" properties of sets of natural numbers

On Wikipedia, there is a list of properties of sets of reals, which are in some sense "interesting": just have a look. I could not find a comparable list of properties of sets of natural numbers (...