Mathematical logic

The first textbook on symbolic logic for the layman was written by Lewis Carroll,^[33] author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in 1896.^[34]

Alfred Tarski developed the basics of model theory.

Beginning in 1935, a group of prominent mathematicians collaborated under the pseudonym

The study of computability came to be known as recursion theory or computability theory, because early formalizations by Gödel and Kleene relied on recursive definitions of functions.^[b] When these definitions were shown equivalent to Turing's formalization involving Turing machines, it became clear that a new concept – the computable function – had been discovered, and that this definition was robust enough to admit numerous independent characterizations. In his work on the incompleteness theorems in 1931, Gödel lacked a rigorous concept of an effective formal system; he immediately realized that the new definitions of computability could be used for this purpose, allowing him to state the incompleteness theorems in generality that could only be implied in the original paper.

Numerous results in recursion theory were obtained in the 1940s by Stephen Cole Kleene and Emil Leon Post. Kleene^[35] introduced the concepts of relative computability, foreshadowed by Turing,^[36] and the arithmetical hierarchy. Kleene later generalized recursion theory to higher-order functionals. Kleene and Georg Kreisel studied formal versions of intuitionistic mathematics, particularly in the context of proof theory.

Logical connectives
NOT ${\displaystyle \neg A}$, ${\displaystyle -A}$, ${\displaystyle {\overline {A}}}$, ${\displaystyle \sim A}$ AND ${\displaystyle A\land B}$, ${\displaystyle A\cdot B}$, ${\displaystyle AB}$, ${\displaystyle A\&B}$, ${\displaystyle A\&\&B}$ NAND ${\displaystyle A{\overline {\land }}B}$, ${\displaystyle A\uparrow B}$, ${\displaystyle A\mid B}$, ${\displaystyle {\overline {A\cdot B}}}$ OR ${\displaystyle A\lor B}$, ${\displaystyle A+B}$, ${\displaystyle A\mid B}$, ${\displaystyle A\parallel B}$ NOR ${\displaystyle A{\overline {\lor }}B}$, ${\displaystyle A\downarrow B}$, ${\displaystyle {\overline {A+B}}}$ XNOR ${\displaystyle A\ {\text{XNOR}}\ B}$ └ equivalent ${\displaystyle A\equiv B}$, ${\displaystyle A\Leftrightarrow B}$, ${\displaystyle A\leftrightharpoons B}$ XOR ${\displaystyle A{\underline {\lor }}B}$, ${\displaystyle A\oplus B}$ └nonequivalent ${\displaystyle A\not \equiv B}$, ${\displaystyle A\not \Leftrightarrow B}$, ${\displaystyle A\nleftrightarrow B}$ implies ${\displaystyle A\Rightarrow B}$, ${\displaystyle A\supset B}$, ${\displaystyle A\rightarrow B}$ converse ${\displaystyle A\Leftarrow B}$, ${\displaystyle A\subset B}$, ${\displaystyle A\leftarrow B}$
Related concepts
Propositional calculus Predicate logic Boolean algebra Truth table Truth function Boolean function Functional completeness Scope (logic)
Applications
Digital logic Programming languages Mathematical logic Philosophy of logic
Category
v t e

At its core, mathematical logic deals with mathematical concepts expressed using

First-order logic is a particular

Early results from formal logic established limitations of first-order logic. The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem (1919) showed that if a set of sentences in a countable first-order language has an infinite model then it has at least one model of each infinite cardinality. This shows that it is impossible for a set of first-order axioms to characterize the natural numbers, the real numbers, or any other infinite structure up to isomorphism. As the goal of early foundational studies was to produce axiomatic theories for all parts of mathematics, this limitation was particularly stark.

Gödel's completeness theorem established the equivalence between semantic and syntactic definitions of logical consequence in first-order logic.^[30] It shows that if a particular sentence is true in every model that satisfies a particular set of axioms, then there must be a finite deduction of the sentence from the axioms. The compactness theorem first appeared as a lemma in Gödel's proof of the completeness theorem, and it took many years before logicians grasped its significance and began to apply it routinely. It says that a set of sentences has a model if and only if every finite subset has a model, or in other words that an inconsistent set of formulas must have a finite inconsistent subset. The completeness and compactness theorems allow for sophisticated analysis of logical consequence in first-order logic and the development of model theory, and they are a key reason for the prominence of first-order logic in mathematics.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems establish additional limits on first-order axiomatizations.^[37] The first incompleteness theorem states that for any consistent, effectively given (defined below) logical system that is capable of interpreting arithmetic, there exists a statement that is true (in the sense that it holds for the natural numbers) but not provable within that logical system (and which indeed may fail in some non-standard models of arithmetic which may be consistent with the logical system). For example, in every logical system capable of expressing the Peano axioms, the Gödel sentence holds for the natural numbers but cannot be proved.

Here a logical system is said to be effectively given if it is possible to decide, given any formula in the language of the system, whether the formula is an axiom, and one which can express the Peano axioms is called "sufficiently strong." When applied to first-order logic, the first incompleteness theorem implies that any sufficiently strong, consistent, effective first-order theory has models that are not

Higher-order logics allow for quantification not only of elements of the domain of discourse, but subsets of the domain of discourse, sets of such subsets, and other objects of higher type. The semantics are defined so that, rather than having a separate domain for each higher-type quantifier to range over, the quantifiers instead range over all objects of the appropriate type. The logics studied before the development of first-order logic, for example Frege's logic, had similar set-theoretic aspects. Although higher-order logics are more expressive, allowing complete axiomatizations of structures such as the natural numbers, they do not satisfy analogues of the completeness and compactness theorems from first-order logic, and are thus less amenable to proof-theoretic analysis.

Another type of logics are fixed-point logics that allow

One can formally define an extension of first-order logic — a notion which encompasses all logics in this section because they behave like first-order logic in certain fundamental ways, but does not encompass all logics in general, e.g. it does not encompass intuitionistic, modal or fuzzy logic.

Lindström's theorem implies that the only extension of first-order logic satisfying both the compactness theorem and the downward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem is first-order logic.

Modal logics include additional modal operators, such as an operator which states that a particular formula is not only true, but necessarily true. Although modal logic is not often used to axiomatize mathematics, it has been used to study the properties of first-order provability^[38] and set-theoretic forcing.^[39]

Algebraic logic uses the methods of abstract algebra to study the semantics of formal logics. A fundamental example is the use of Boolean algebras to represent truth values in classical propositional logic, and the use of Heyting algebras to represent truth values in intuitionistic propositional logic. Stronger logics, such as first-order logic and higher-order logic, are studied using more complicated algebraic structures such as cylindric algebras.

Set theory is the study of sets, which are abstract collections of objects. Many of the basic notions, such as ordinal and cardinal numbers, were developed informally by Cantor before formal axiomatizations of set theory were developed. The first such axiomatization, due to Zermelo,^[23] was extended slightly to become Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF), which is now the most widely used foundational theory for mathematics.

Other formalizations of set theory have been proposed, including von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG), Morse–Kelley set theory (MK), and New Foundations (NF). Of these, ZF, NBG, and MK are similar in describing a cumulative hierarchy of sets. New Foundations takes a different approach; it allows objects such as the set of all sets at the cost of restrictions on its set-existence axioms. The system of Kripke–Platek set theory is closely related to generalized recursion theory.

Two famous statements in set theory are the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis. The axiom of choice, first stated by Zermelo,^[19] was proved independent of ZF by Fraenkel,^[25] but has come to be widely accepted by mathematicians. It states that given a collection of nonempty sets there is a single set C that contains exactly one element from each set in the collection. The set C is said to "choose" one element from each set in the collection. While the ability to make such a choice is considered obvious by some, since each set in the collection is nonempty, the lack of a general, concrete rule by which the choice can be made renders the axiom nonconstructive. Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski showed that the axiom of choice can be used to decompose a solid ball into a finite number of pieces which can then be rearranged, with no scaling, to make two solid balls of the original size.^[40] This theorem, known as the Banach–Tarski paradox, is one of many counterintuitive results of the axiom of choice.

The continuum hypothesis, first proposed as a conjecture by Cantor, was listed by David Hilbert as one of his 23 problems in 1900. Gödel showed that the continuum hypothesis cannot be disproven from the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (with or without the axiom of choice), by developing the constructible universe of set theory in which the continuum hypothesis must hold. In 1963, Paul Cohen showed that the continuum hypothesis cannot be proven from the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.^[26] This independence result did not completely settle Hilbert's question, however, as it is possible that new axioms for set theory could resolve the hypothesis. Recent work along these lines has been conducted by W. Hugh Woodin, although its importance is not yet clear.^[41]

Contemporary research in set theory includes the study of

Model theory studies the models of various formal theories. Here a theory is a set of formulas in a particular formal logic and signature, while a model is a structure that gives a concrete interpretation of the theory. Model theory is closely related to universal algebra and algebraic geometry, although the methods of model theory focus more on logical considerations than those fields.

The set of all models of a particular theory is called an elementary class; classical model theory seeks to determine the properties of models in a particular elementary class, or determine whether certain classes of structures form elementary classes.

The method of

A trivial consequence of the continuum hypothesis is that a complete theory with less than continuum many nonisomorphic countable models can have only countably many. Vaught's conjecture, named after Robert Lawson Vaught, says that this is true even independently of the continuum hypothesis. Many special cases of this conjecture have been established.

Generalized recursion theory extends the ideas of recursion theory to computations that are no longer necessarily finite. It includes the study of computability in higher types as well as areas such as hyperarithmetical theory and α-recursion theory.

Contemporary research in recursion theory includes the study of applications such as

An important subfield of recursion theory studies algorithmic unsolvability; a decision problem or function problem is algorithmically unsolvable if there is no possible computable algorithm that returns the correct answer for all legal inputs to the problem. The first results about unsolvability, obtained independently by Church and Turing in 1936, showed that the Entscheidungsproblem is algorithmically unsolvable. Turing proved this by establishing the unsolvability of the halting problem, a result with far-ranging implications in both recursion theory and computer science.

There are many known examples of undecidable problems from ordinary mathematics. The word problem for groups was proved algorithmically unsolvable by Pyotr Novikov in 1955 and independently by W. Boone in 1959. The busy beaver problem, developed by Tibor Radó in 1962, is another well-known example.

Hilbert's tenth problem asked for an algorithm to determine whether a multivariate polynomial equation with integer coefficients has a solution in the integers. Partial progress was made by Julia Robinson, Martin Davis and Hilary Putnam. The algorithmic unsolvability of the problem was proved by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970.^[45]