Category Archives: Math

Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 31

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MW: Last time we learned about the “back-and-forth” condition for two countable structures M and N for a (countable) language L:

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 30

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MW: Time to finish off Enayat’s Theorem 7:

Theorem 7: Every countable recursively saturated model N of PA+ΦT is a T-standard model of PA.

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 29

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MW: We’re still going through Enayat’s proof of his Theorem 7:

Theorem 7: Every countable recursively saturated model N of PA+ΦT is a T-standard model of PA.

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 28

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MW: I ended the last post with a puzzle. Here it is again, in more detail.

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 27

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MW: Enayat’s second major result is:

Theorem 7: Every countable recursively saturated model of PA+ΦT is a T-standard model of PA.

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Very Unique

My unique (but not very unique) microwave

Everyone has their pet peeves, and peeves about language abound. My pet peeve is with people who object that “very unique” is illogical. For example, this pithy statement:

Uniqueness is a binary condition. Something is unique or it is not. There are no degrees of uniqueness. Something cannot be partly unique, mostly unique, very unique, etc.

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Topics in Nonstandard Arithmetic 10: Truth (Part 4)

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Previous “Truth” post

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 26

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MW: Continuing the recap… Continue reading

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Nonstandard Models of Arithmetic 25

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Previous Enayat post

MW: It’s been ages since John Baez and I discussed Enayat’s paper—not since October 2020! John has since moved on to fresh woods and pastures new. I’ve been reading novels. But I feel I owe it to our millions of readers to finish the tale, so here goes.

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The −1 Dimensional Reduced Homology Group of the Empty Set

Hatcher’s Algebraic Topology unfortunately hadn’t been written when I studied the subject in grad school, but a few years ago I participated in a meetup that went through about half of it. I wrote up notes on things I puzzled over, or just observations I found helpful. Here they are. Besides the homology group mentioned in the title, some other tidbits: a figure to elucidate the calculation of the fundamental group of the complement of the Alexander Horned Sphere, and more details for the intuitive proof Hatcher sketches of Poincaré duality.

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