Australian Category Seminar

The countable reals

Andrej Bauer·21 August 2024

Cantor's theorem about uncountability of the reals can be proved using excluded middle or countable choice. But can it be proved without either of them? I will present joint work with James E. Hanson in which we give the answer by constructing a topos, i.e., a model of intuotionistic higher-order logic, in which the Dedekind reals are countable. There are two main ingredients:

• A result in computability theory, established by Joseph S. Miller, that there exists a sequence of reals against which oracle Turing machines cannot diagonalize uniformly in the oracle representing the sequence. The theorem relies on a generalization of Brouwer's fixed point theorem to the Hilbert cube and multi-valued continuous maps whose images are closed convex sets.

• A new variant of realizability, which we call uniform realizability that embodies the uniform oracle computations used in Miller's sequences.

In this talk I will present the general ideas, the construction of Miller's sequences, and outline uniform realizability.

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