[FOM] Re: Addition with Primality

H. Enderton hbe at math.ucla.edu
Mon Aug 9 12:56:17 EDT 2004


Karim Zahidid pointed out that
>there is a paper  proving the undecidability of addition and primality
>assuming Schinzel's Hypothesis.  It appeared in the Journal of Symbolic
>Logic in the mid nineties.  The authors include Alan Woods and
>Jockusch.

And the third author is P. T. Bateman.  JSL, vol. 58 no. 2 (1993),
pp. 672-687.  The paper shows that -- given Schinzel's Hypothesis
from number theory -- multiplication is definable from addition and
primality.

As that paper notes, Semenov has shown that the theory of the natural
numbers with addition and the set of factorials is decidable.

--Herb Enderton




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