Presentation Report on Dr.

Coxs Talk Philip White Math 490 9/27/2013

Sean Cox, an economist turned set theorist, presented to the class on September 23, 2013. The title of Dr. Coxs presentation was Undecidable Problems in Mathematics, and naturally the talk was about undecidable problems. Sean Cox surveyed well-known Undecidable problems from the various areas of mathematics. As you have probably noticed, the author reviewed in my first critical review wrote on a similar topic to Dr. Coxs presentation, the decision problem. The reason I keep choosing to write about undecidability, is because I myself have a strong interest in the topic. The process has been slow, but I hope to one day understand Godels formal proofs of incompleteness. Anyhow, let us continue. To start the lecture off, Dr. Cox reviewed some well-known provable, yet extremely difficult, problems of mathematics. Two of the problems he mentioned were Fermets Last Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture. The proof of Fermets Last Theorem alone is books length and includes references to thousands of pages of mathematics. After reviewing the proven problems, Dr. Cox reviewed a separate category of unknown mathematical problems, albeit the reason for their unknown status is likely lack of ingenuity on the part of the mathematicians. The two obvious examples of problems from this category are the P=NP problem and the Riemann Hypothesis. Finally Dr. Cox mentioned a third category of problem, truly undecidable problems, as in, problems undecidable not from a lack of ingenuity. For example, Godel coded statements like, I am consistent, or, I am not consistent, into a formal first order mathematical language

 and he rigorously proved that these statements were not provable in such a framework. Dr. Cox went on to mention a few other undecidable problems. I found Dr. Coxs presentation to be very informative, not so much from the information presented, but from his style of presentation. When presenting, it is definitely easier if you have reminder-notes prepared. I have to give a talk this upcoming Monday, and I will surely use Dr. Coxs technique of writing down reminder-notes. When it comes to Dr. Coxs topic, I am interested in something he brushed over. He mentioned that something called Presburger Arithmetic is complete, however I now that Godels incompleteness theorem uses a language only slightly larger than Presburger Arithmetic. I am thoroughly confused as to why such a small change can change the status of a mathematical language from incomplete to complete. I hope to further investigate this topic.