this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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[–] Taldan@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (17 children)

Presumably you were starting with a fundamental axiom such as 1 + 1 = 2, which is the difficult one to prove because it's so fundamental

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 week ago (13 children)

I find this axiomatization of the naturals quite neat:

  1. Zero is a natural number. 0∈ℕ
  2. For every natural number there exists a succeeding natural number. ∀_n_∈ℕ: s(n)∈ℕ (s denotes the successor function)

Now the neat part: If 0 is a constant, then s(0) is also a constant. So we can invent a name for that constant and call it “1.” Now s(s(0)) is a constant, too. Call it “2” and proceed to invent the natural numbers.

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago (9 children)

That axiomisation is incomplete as it doesn't preclude stuff like loops, a predecessor to zero or a second number line.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago

There are non-standard models of arithmetic. They follow the original first-order Peano axioms and any theorem about the naturals is true for them, but they have some wacky extra stuff in them like you mention.

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