[FOM] Re: Absoluteness of Clay prize problems

Timothy Y. Chow tchow at alum.mit.edu
Wed Aug 25 12:18:39 EDT 2004


Harvey Friedman <friedman at math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
> the following phenomena. When a celebrated theorem of this kind is proved,
> mathematicians will quickly and fruitfully dissect it into the trivial
> component and the nontrivial novel component. The trivial component will
> generally involve nonarithmetical statements. However, the nontrivial novel
> component will be Pi-0-1 or maybe Pi-0-2.

Can you give explicit examples of this?  What leads you to this intuition?

> Another is "is there intelligent life in the universe?"

I wondered this myself after seeing some of the judges' decisions at the 
Olympics.

Tim



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