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Concept
Goodstein's theorem
Summary
In mathematical logic, Goodstein's theorem is a statement about the natural numbers, proved by Reuben Goodstein in 1944, which states that every Goodstein sequence eventually terminates at 0. Laurence Kirby and Jeff Paris showed that it is unprovable in Peano arithmetic (but it can be proven in stronger systems, such as second-order arithmetic). This was the third example of a true statement that is unprovable in Peano arithmetic, after the examples provided by Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Gerhard Gentzen's 1943 direct proof of the unprovability of ε0-induction in Peano arithmetic. The Paris–Harrington theorem gave another example.
Kirby and Paris introduced a graph-theoretic hydra game with behavior similar to that of Goodstein sequences: the "Hydra" (named for the mythological multi-headed Hydra of Lerna) is a rooted tree, and a move consists of cutting off one of its "heads" (a branch of the tree), to which the hydra responds by growing a finite number of new heads according to certain rules. Kirby and Paris proved that the Hydra will eventually be killed, regardless of the strategy that Hercules uses to chop off its heads, though this may take a very long time. Just like for Goodstein sequences, Kirby and Paris showed that it cannot be proven in Peano arithmetic alone.
Goodstein sequences are defined in terms of a concept called "hereditary base-n notation". This notation is very similar to usual base-n positional notation, but the usual notation does not suffice for the purposes of Goodstein's theorem.
In ordinary base-n notation, where n is a natural number greater than 1, an arbitrary natural number m is written as a sum of multiples of powers of n:
where each coefficient ai satisfies 0 ≤ ai < n, and ak ≠ 0. For example, in base 2,
Thus the base-2 representation of 35 is 100011, which means 25 + 2 + 1. Similarly, 100 represented in base-3 is 10201:
Note that the exponents themselves are not written in base-n notation. For example, the expressions above include 25 and 34, and 5 > 2, 4 > 3.
Official source
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