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The article is fine as long as it goes but thinking of set theory as the "foundational laws" of mathematics is sort of a mid-20th century understanding of math.
by pavpanchekha 9y ago
The article is fine as long as it goes but thinking of set theory as the "foundational laws" of mathematics is sort of a mid-20th century understanding of math. We have a better understanding of what axioms are for and how foundations should be structured. I am confident the author understands the more subtle framing I'd like to discuss, but I think it's worth describing here for readers who were confused.
The main difference: this is not a new "law of mathematics" so much as a new law of set theory. No one but set theorists will be affected, and no other mathematicians care much.
Foundations are not nearly as set as undergrad math teaches you. I don't mean the Axiom of Choice (which pretty much no one has any problems with anymore). However, various large cardinal axioms are pretty standard in advanced Algebraic Geometry (for example, the existence of Grothendiek Universes). Set theorists work with all sorts of large cardinal axioms all the time, and for a while it was fashionable to assume various generalized continuum hypotheses. Graph theorists, for some applications, assume "V=L", because that makes things tidy. It's fine, and no one really has a problem with it, nor do these disagreements really cause problems, even though some of these axioms are contradictory. (And even when various large cardinal axioms are assumed, often people work with an intuitive ill-founded set theory with the assumption that it can be made well-founded by ramifying using the large cardinals instead.)
The 21-century understanding is something like: there's no need for there to be "ultimate" foundations. As mentioned, there is little impact on "ordinary" mathematics from different axioms of set theory, so maybe the set theorists should choose axioms of set theory, but that needn't affect other mathematicians. Obviously someone should study set theory, it's cool and there are interesting theorems and so on; and if they find that "V = ultimate L" is a useful axiom for their field of study, nothing wrong with that, much like commutative algebra is a fine field of study though of course non-commutative algebra is interesting too. But there's no realistic sense in which group theory is "defined in terms of" set theory—you can tell, because group theorists tend not to care about set theoretic axioms, and have no dog in choosing between "V=ultimate L" and forcing.
The argument between "V = ultimate L" and the forcing axioms are a debate over what "set theory" should study, and each mathematician involved thinks that it should study the sort of things that they study—whether that means forcing or large cardinal axioms. Large cardinal axiom people have a well-developed kind of work they want to do: defining various forms of large cardinals, proving implications between them, and then discovering that all large cardinal axioms are totally ordered by proof strength. It's good, interesting work, and "V = ultimate-L" will really complete the research program they've been pursuing; or, proving independence results for various theorems, and a forcing axiom would really put the machinery they work with deep into the foundations of set theory, making that work much simpler and at the same time deeper. That, too, is a valuable field of research, in fact it has led to the only Fields medal in logic.
I assure you that your personal understanding of sets will not be affected much by which axiom which mathematicians choose to adopt.
- fmap 9y agoGreat post, let me just add one point: > The 21-century understanding is something like: there's no need for there to be "ultimate" foundations. The modern view is that there simply is no ultimate foundation. Large cardinal axioms in set theory can be seen as adding more and more inner models of set theory (with fewer large cardinals) into an ambient theory. This is basically the same thing as asserting that "the previous theory is consistent". You can play this game forever and it will not converge - the result hinted at in the article states something different. --- In the end we use set theory as an alibi. We tell people that ultimately all of mathematics can be encoded in set theory, but it is neither a natural encoding, nor is it really true since we are talking about different flavors of "set theory". Algebraic geometry is a good example. To begin with, you are not using ZFC to encode categories - since you need to be able to manipulate proper classes as if they were sets - so we need to use some extension such as NBG set theory instead. Then, in order to construct the localisation of a large category you suddenly need large cardinals, even though intuitively the localisation is in some sense no larger than the category you start with. And this is the point where we forget this construction again, because it doesn't give any useful insights.
- mcguire 9y ago"We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye."