DOIAbstract
Prompted by Gentzen’s 1936 consistency proof, Goodstein found a close fit between descending sequences of ordinals <ε0 and sequences of integers, now known as Goodstein sequences. This chapter revisits Goodstein’s 1944 paper. In light of new historical details found in a correspondence between Bernays and Goodstein, we address the question of how close Goodstein came to proving an independence result for PA. We also present an elementary proof of the fact that already the termination of all special Goodstein sequences, i.e. those induced by the shift function, is not provable in PA. This was first proved by Kirby and Paris in 1982, using techniques from the model theory of arithmetic. The proof presented here arguably only uses tools that w...
Add to ORKG