Initial self-embeddings of models of set theory

Ali Enayat, Zachiri McKenzie

Published 2019-06-07Version 1

By a classical theorem of Harvey Friedman (1973), every countable nonstandard model $\mathcal{M}$ of a sufficiently strong fragment of ZF has a proper rank-initial self-embedding $j$, i.e., $j$ is a self-embedding of $\mathcal{M}$ such that $j[\mathcal{M}]\subsetneq\mathcal{M}$, and the ordinal rank of each member of $j[\mathcal{M}]$ is less than the ordinal rank of each element of $\mathcal{M}\setminus j[\mathcal{M}]$. Here we investigate the larger family of proper initial-embeddings $j$ of models $\mathcal{M}$ of fragments of set theory, where the image of $j$ is a transitive submodel of $\mathcal{M}$.