A walk with Goodstein

David Fernández-Duque, Andreas Weiermann

Published 2020-04-20Version 1

Goodstein's principle is arguably the first purely number-theoretic statement known to be independent of Peano arithmetic. It involves sequences of natural numbers which at first appear to grow very quickly, but eventually decrease to zero. These sequences are defined relative to a notation system based on exponentiation for the natural numbers. In this article, we explore notions of optimality for such notation systems and apply them to the classical Goodstein process, to a weaker variant based on multiplication rather than exponentiation, and to a stronger variant based on the Ackermann function. In particular, we introduce the notion of base-change maximality, and show how it leads to far-reaching extensions of Goodstein's result.