Mathematics and Computation

November 4, 2006

Are small sentences of Peano arithmetic decidable?

Filed under: Computation, General, Logic — Andrej Bauer @ 23:44

Recently there has been a discussion (here, here, here, and here) on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list about completeness of Peano arithmetic (PA) with respect to “small” sentences. Harvey Friedman made several conjectures of the following kind: “All true small sentences of PA are provable.” He proposed measures of smallness, such as counting the number of distinct variables or restricting the depth of terms. Here are some statistics concerning such statements.

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