Philipp Gerhardy

General logical metatheorems for functional analysis

In this paper we prove general logical metatheorems which state that for large classes of theorems and proofs in (nonlinear) functional analysis it is possible to extract from the proofs effective bounds which depend only on very sparse local bounds on certain parameters. This means that the bounds are uniform for all parameters meeting these weak local boundedness conditions. The results vastly generalize related theorems due to the second author where the global boundedness of the underlying metric space (resp. a convex subset of a normed space) was assumed. Our results treat general classes of spaces such as metric, hyperbolic, CAT(0), normed, uniformly convex and inner product spaces and classes of functions such as nonexpansive, Holder-Lipschitz, uniformly continuous, bounded and weakly quasi-nonexpansive ones. We give several applications in the area of metric fixed point theory. In particular, we show that the uniformities observed in a number of recently found effective bounds (by proof theoretic analysis) can be seen as instances of our general logical results.

Refined complexity analysis of cut elimination

In [1,2] Zhang shows how the complexity of cut elimination depends on the nesting of quantifiers in cut formulas. By studying the role of contractions we can refine that analysis and show how the complexity depends on a combination of contractions and quantifier nesting. With the refined analysis the upper bound on cut elimination coincides with Statman’s lower bound. Every non-elementary growth example must display a combination of nesting of quantifiers and contractions similar to Statman’s lower bound example. The upper and lower bounds on cut elimination immediately translate into bounds on Herbrand’s theorem. Finally we discuss the role of quantifier alternations and show an elementary upper bound for the ∀ − ∧-case (resp. ∃ − ∨-case).

Extracting Herbrand Disjunctions by Functional Interpretation

Abstract.Carrying out a suggestion by Kreisel, we adapt Gödel’s functional interpretation to ordinary first-order predicate logic(PL) and thus devise an algorithm to extract Herbrand terms from PL-proofs. The extraction is carried out in an extension of PL to higher types. The algorithm consists of two main steps: first we extract a functional realizer, next we compute the β-normal-form of the realizer from which the Herbrand terms can be read off. Even though the extraction is carried out in the extended language, the terms are ordinary PL-terms. In contrast to approaches to Herbrand’s theorem based on cut elimination orɛ-elimination this extraction technique is, except for the normalization step, of low polynomial complexity, fully modular and furthermore allows an analysis of the structure of the Herbrand terms, in the spirit of Kreisel ([13]), already prior to the normalization step. It is expected that the implementation of functional interpretation in Schwichtenberg’s MINLOG system can be adapted to yield an efficient Herbrand-term extraction tool.

Skolem + Tetration Is Well-Ordered

The problem of whether a certain set of number-theoretic functions --- defined via tetration (i.e. iterated exponentiation) --- is well-ordered by the majorisation relation , was posed by Skolem in 1956. We prove here that indeed it is a computable well-order , and give a lower bound *** 0 on its ordinal.