[FOM] re: Absoluteness of Clay prize problems

Dave Marker marker at math.uic.edu
Wed Aug 25 14:05:37 EDT 2004


Harvey Friedman wrote:
>In the same way, I believe that in your second category, "the study of
>real numbers and certain well-behaved functions on real numbers", you
will
>find 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.

Harvey:

Can you give an illustration of this idea?

Dave Marker





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