Apuntes de Teoria de los Conjuntos Abstractos by Julio Rey Pastor

Review by: Alonzo Church

The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Sep., 1963), pp. 250-251
Published by: Association for Symbolic Logic
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250 REVIEWS

that the structure of mathematics rests ultimately on certain unproved principles

and intuitively given concepts. From the philosophical point of view, there are
essential gaps in the incompleteness proof because the arithmetization of metamathe-
matics itself is not purely formal in nature. There remains something unformalizable
which might mean a sort of intuitiveness. Even though it is the actual condition under
which the formalization becomes practicable, it cannot for this reason formalize itself.
From this point of view, the concept of intuition which precedes the formalization
as its indispensable principle must be of a philosophical nature.
According to G6del's theorem we cannot prove the consistency of a formalized
system by methods which belong to that system. However, this does not mean that
Hilbert's theory of proof has lost its lasting value, because the formalization which
conditions the whole procedure of G6del's proof is determined by an unproved principle
which is intuitively given. In this sense the adequacy of the formalization itself is not
absolute, but relative to the nature of the subject. The results of proof theory will
remain valuable within the frame of formal systems. The consistency proofs will be
admitted if and only if we assume the fundamental idea of formalization and decide
to stay within the assumption. But if we decide to go outside of such assumption in
order to search for the actual condition of the formalization itself, the adequacy of
the consistency proofs will become problematical outside the formalized system.
Since the actual condition of the formalizability of given expressions is never itself
formalizable, we are necessarily led to the existence of extra-mathematical principles.
Mathematics itself can construct nothing unformalizable; all it can do is to formalize
the given materials as much as possible.
The author hopes that there will be produced some notable results concerning
other ontological problems of the foundations of mathematics. KURT SCHtTTE

HAO WANG. The predicate calculus. A survey of mathematical logic, Studies

in logic and the foundations of mathematics, Science Press, Peking, and North-Holland
Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1963, pp. 307-321.
Various formalizations of the predicate calculus are discussed. Some remarks are
made about Herbrana's theorem, the Skolem-LTwenheim theorem, the completeness
theorem, the s-theorem, and the axiom of choice. Methodological and historical
interconnections are pointed out. The author states that many of these remarks
appeared in his symposium paper XXII 292(2). STEVEN OREY

HAO WANG. Many-sortedpredicatecalculi. Ibid., pp. 322-333.

In the main this a reprintof XVIII 77. The principal result of that paper is also
given in Arnold Schmidt's XVII 76. In the paper under review the author explains
that XVIII 77 had been submittedforpublication beforeSchmidt's paper appeared,
and that he had thereforebeen unable to take account of the latter. He remarks,
however, that his own proof of the principal result appears to be more direct than
Schmidt's.
The present paper contains several referencesnot given in XVIII 77. This is re-
commendedreadingforanyone interestedin many-sortedtheories. STEVEN OREY
JULIO REY PASTOR. Apuntes de teoria de los conjuntos abstractos. Litho-
graphed. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educaci6n,
Instituto de Matem.ticas, San Luis, Argentina,1957, 55 pp.
This is a concise descriptiveaccount of abstract set theory,evidentlyintended to
serve the purpose of elementary exposition. The treatment is not axiomatically
formulated.But a concluding section has a careful statement of the two different
formsin which the axiom (or principle)of choice was stated by Zermelo,and of the
lemma of Zorn, and the equivalence of the three is proved.

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 REVIEWS 251

This concluding section has a historical inaccuracy, in that the historical order of
the two Zermelo forms of the axiom of choice is interchanged - and the wrong one
of the two is therefore ascribed to Russell. Moreover this section has no clear indication
of the relationship of the axiom of choice to proofs which were given earlier (especially
on pages 25-27) and which in fact require this axiom. ALONZO CHURCH
GONZALO ZUBIETA R. De/iniciones formales de numerabilidad. Boletin de la
Sociedad Matemdtica Mexicana, ser. 2, vol. 1 no. 1 (1956), pp. 49-56.
The firstpart of the paper is a presentation of the Henkin-Hasenjaeger completeness
proof for (a system equivalent to) the fragment of Quine's NF (II 86) obtained when
stratification of formulas is abandoned and the principles of extensionality (P1)
and abstraction (R3) are omitted.
Then, in a system Q equivalent to NF the author considers two definitions of the
ordered pair (x, y) (the first is D 14 of NF):
D 14. (x, y) for {{x}, {x, y}}
and
D14'. (x, y) for {{x}, {x, {y}}}.
These two definitions lead to two distinct notions of one-to-one function, hence to
two distinct notions of denumerability. Let D and V' be the two formulas that result
from the schema
(y)()(t) (y, t) e x & (z, t) ex -* (y = z)
when D14 and D14', respectively, are used. Then, the author states, both

(1) Q F 3x(4D & (y) 3x . (y, Z) e x)

and
(2) Q F (x) (' 3y(z). (y, Z) e x)
are provable.
Let 'T and T' be the two definitions of denumerability that correspond to sD and V',
respectively. Then,
Q I 3x -'
is provable, while no proof of
Q 3
3- T
has yet been found. JOHN VAN HEIJENOORT

VLADETA VU6KOVI6. Partially orderedrecursive arithmetics. Mathematica Scan-

dinavica, vol. 7 (1959), pp. 305-320.
VLADETA VU6KOVId. Einfjihrung von Ef(X) und Hf(x) in der rekursiven Gitter-
punktarithmetik. German, with Bulgarian and Russian summaries. B'lgarska Aka-
ddmid na Naukitd, Izvdstid na Matdmath'4skid Institut, vol. 6 (1962), pp. 15-25.
In the first paper the author introduces an interesting generalization of a logic-
free formalization of primitive recursive arithmetic. The single successor function
Sx is replaced by a class of successors So, S1, ... (finite or infinite) which in this
paper are taken to be commutative, so that SiSjO = SjSiO for all i, j. Definition by
primitive recursion now takes the form

F(x, 0) = a(x), F(x, Siy) = bi(x, y, F(x, y)) for all successors Si,
where the functions bj are subject to the conditions

bi(x, Sjy, bj(x, y, z)) = bj(x, Sty, bi(x, y, z))

for all i, j e I, where I is the class of suffixes i for which Si is a successor function.
A function is called recursive if it is definable by substitution and recursion from
initial functions Six, Zx = O Ix = x. The rules of inference are the familiar sub-

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