Ordinal notations

In mathematical logic and set theory, an ordinal notation is a partial function from the set of all finite sequences of symbols from a finite alphabet to a countable set of ordinals, and a Gödel numbering is a function from the set of well-formed formulae (a well-formed formula is a finite sequence of symbols on which the ordinal notation function is defined) of some formal language to the natural numbers. This associates each wff with a unique natural number, called its Gödel number. If a Gödel numbering is fixed, then the subset relation on the ordinals induces an ordering on well-formed formulae which in turn induces a well-ordering on the subset of natural numbers. A recursive ordinal notation must satisfy the following two additional properties:

There are many such schemes of ordinal notations, including schemes by Wilhelm Ackermann, Heinz Bachmann, Wilfried Buchholz, Georg Cantor, Solomon Feferman, Gerhard Jäger, Isles, Pfeiffer, Wolfram Pohlers, Kurt Schütte, Gaisi Takeuti (called ordinal diagrams), Oswald Veblen. Stephen Cole Kleene has a system of notations, called Kleene's O, which includes ordinal notations but it is not as well behaved as the other systems described here.

Usually one proceeds by defining several functions from ordinals to ordinals and representing each such function by a symbol. In many systems, such as Veblen's well known system, the functions are normal functions, that is, they are strictly increasing and continuous in at least one of their arguments, and increasing in other arguments. Another desirable property for such functions is that the value of the function is greater than each of its arguments, so that an ordinal is always being described in terms of smaller ordinals. There are several such desirable properties. Unfortunately, no one system can have all of them since they contradict each other.

As usual, we must start off with a constant symbol for zero, "0", which we may consider to be a function of arity zero. This is necessary because there are no smaller ordinals in terms of which zero can be described. The most obvious next step would be to define a unary function, "S", which takes an ordinal to the smallest ordinal greater than it; in other words, S is the successor function. In combination with zero, successor allows one to name any natural number.

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