Elementary function arithmetic: Difference between revisions

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In [[proof theory]], a branch of [[mathematical logic]], '''elementary function arithmetic''' or '''exponential function arithmetic (EFA)''' is the system of arithmetic with the usual elementary properties of 0, 1, +, ×, ''x''^''y'', together with [[mathematical induction|induction]] for formulas with bounded quantifiers.

EFA, Elementary Function Arithmetic or Exponential Function Arithmetic is a very weak logical system, whose [[proof theoretic ordinal]] is ω³, but still seems able to prove much of ordinary mathematics that can be stated in the language of first-order arithmetic and was developed by [[Harvey Friedman]].

EFA, Elementary Function Arithmetic or Exponential Function Arithmetic is a very weak logical system, whose [[proof theoretic ordinal]] is ω³, but still seems able to prove much of ordinary mathematics that can be stated in the language of first-order arithmetic and was developed by [[Harvey Friedman]].

==Definition==

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*a binary relation symbol < (This is not really necessary as it can be written in terms of the other operations and is sometimes omitted, but is convenient for defining bounded quantifiers).

Bounded quantifiers are those of the form ∀(x<y) and ∃ (x<y) which are abbreviations for ∀ x (x<y)→,,, and ∃x (x<y)∧... in the usual way.

The axioms of EFA are

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==Related systems==

One can omit the binary function symbol exp from the language, by taking Robinson arithmetic together with induction for all formulas with bounded quantifiers and an axiom stating roughly that exponentiation is a function defined everywhere. This is similar to EFA and has the same proof theoretic strength, but is more cumbersome to work with.

There are weak fragments of second-order arithmetic called RCA{{su|p=*|b=0}} and WKL{{su|p=*|b=0}} that have the same consistency strength as EFA and are conservative over it for Π{{su|p=0|b=2}} sentences, which are sometimes studied in [[reverse mathematics]] {{harv|Simpson|2009}}.