Construction and Set Theory

Andrew Powell

Published 2019-02-20Version 1

This paper argues that mathematical objects are constructions and that constructions introduce a flexibility in the ways that mathematical objects are represented (as sets of binary sequences for example) and presented (in a particular order for example). The construction approach is then applied to searching for a mathematical object in a set, and a logarithm-time search algorithm outlined which applies to a set X of all binary sequences of length ordinal $\beta$ with a binary label appended to each sequence to indicate that sequence is a member of X or not. It follows that deciding membership of a set of binary sequences of length ordinal $\beta$ takes $\beta+1$ bits, which is shown to be equivalent to the Generalised Continuum Hypothesis.