Paul Cohen and forcing in 1963. (English) Zbl 1230.03006

Hersh, Reuben

Math. Intell. 33, No. 3, 138-140 (2011).

This short note offers a mixture of some remarks concerning the personal relationship of the author to Paul Cohen, and some remarks on the very basic idea – adding suitably many new, generic reals – of Cohen’s construction of a countable countermodel for the continuum hypothesis.

Reviewer: Siegfried J. Gottwald (Leipzig)

MSC:

03-03	History of mathematical logic and foundations
01A60	History of mathematics in the 20th century
01A70	Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies
03E35	Consistency and independence results
03E50	Continuum hypothesis and Martin’s axiom

Keywords:

Paul J. Cohen; forcing; independence of CH

References:

[1]	Peter Sarnak. Remembering Paul Cohen (1934-2007), Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 57 (2010), 824-838.
[2]	Alain Badiou. Being and Event, Continuum, London, 2007. · Zbl 1401.18001
[3]	Alain Badiou. Number and Numbers, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008. · Zbl 1401.18001
[4]	Paul Cohen. Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, W. A. Benjamin, New York, 1966. · Zbl 0182.01301
[5]	Paul Cohen. The discovery of forcing, Rocky Mountain J. Math. 32(4) (2002), 1071-1100. · Zbl 1040.03037
[6]	Paul Cohen, Reuben Hersh. Non-Cantorian set theory, Scientific American (December 1967), 104-116.
[7]	Solomon Feferman. Some applications of the notions of forcing and generic sets, Fundamenta Mathematicae 56 (1965), 325- 345. · Zbl 0129.26401
[8]	Kurt Gödel. Collected Works, Vol. IV, Correspondence A-G, in S. Feferman et al. (eds.), ”Paul J. Cohen,” pp. 375-387.
[9]	Reuben Hersh. Review of Number and Numbers by Alain Badiou, Math. Intelligencer 31(3) (2009), 67-69.
[10]	Gregory H. Moore. The origins of forcing, in F. R. Drake, J. K. Truss, (eds.), Logic Colloquium ’86, 143-173. · Zbl 0655.03034