Logic and Foundations Commons^™

Formally Verifying Peano Arithmetic, Morgan Sinclaire

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work is concerned with implementing Gentzen’s consistency proof in the Coq theorem prover.

In Chapter 1, we summarize the basic philosophical, historical, and mathematical background behind this theorem. This includes the philosophical motivation for attempting to prove the consistency of Peano arithmetic, which traces itself from the first attempted axiomatizations of mathematics to the maturation of Hilbert’s program. We introduce many of the basic concepts in mathematical logic along the way: first-order logic (FOL), Peano arithmetic (PA), primitive recursive arithmetic (PRA), Gödel's 2nd Incompleteness theorem, and the ordinals below ε₀.

In …