Well, it's time for me to declare a big "oops".
My paper Transfinitely iterated natural multiplication of ordinal numbers was recently rejected from the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, and for good reason.
The mathematical assertions aren't wrong. But contrary to what I said, it's actually quite easy to prove Jacobsthal's distributivity law by transfinite induction, and I entirely missed this. My thanks to the anonymous referee for pointing this out. The referee also claimed this is true of my theorem that a⊗(b⊕c)=a⊗b⊗a⊗c, which I haven't yet checked, but is presumably also true.
EDIT Nov 12: OK, now I'm confused. I've tried to check it today, and... all I could get was an inequality. I'm not sure what to make of this.
EDIT Nov 13: OK, I figured out the mistake, disregard the above.
This cuts out a lot of what I said; I'll have to rewrite a lot! It also turns it into, well, more of an expository paper. I mean, I think it's some good exposition; I would still really like to see it published somewhere, because it summarizes and connects up some things that haven't been connected up elsewhere. But I'm going to need to find somewhere else to publish it, that's for sure.
Mind you, there still is the problem of finding an order-theoretic proof of these laws. Of course, that first requires an order-theoretic interpretation of a×b (Jacobsthal's multiplication) and a⊗b (super-Jacobsthal exponentiation).
But the former of those now does in fact exist! Take a look at this paper: Some iterated natural sums, by Paolo Lipparini. It gives an order-theoretic interpretation of the infinitary natural sum, and therefore, implicitly, Jacobsthal multiplication.
This order-theoretic interpretation does not make it immediately obvious that a×(b⊕c)=(a×b)⊕(a×c), nor that a×(b×c)=(a×b)×c; but just having an interpretation at all is a huge start. I have written to Lipparini and he agrees the problem is interesting.
One thing worth noting about this order-theoretic characterization of a×b is that while it makes it obvious that ab≤a×b, it doesn't make it obvious that a×b≤a⊗b. Of course, what Lipparini did wasn't meant specifically as an interpretation of a×b at all, but the generic infinitary natural sum, where you can't assume that all the summands are the same. It's possible that for the specific case of a×b, one might be able to find a reformulation of his characterization that does make this obvious. Of course, proving that this reformulation is the same might be far from easy! Who knows.
So, that's the state of things. Guess I've got quite a bit of work to do... (Well, I guess that's true regardless. In fact I might want to put off fixing this for now to get more writing up of integer complexity done.)
-Harry
My paper Transfinitely iterated natural multiplication of ordinal numbers was recently rejected from the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, and for good reason.
The mathematical assertions aren't wrong. But contrary to what I said, it's actually quite easy to prove Jacobsthal's distributivity law by transfinite induction, and I entirely missed this. My thanks to the anonymous referee for pointing this out. The referee also claimed this is true of my theorem that a⊗(b⊕c)=a⊗b⊗a⊗c, which I haven't yet checked, but is presumably also true.
EDIT Nov 12: OK, now I'm confused. I've tried to check it today, and... all I could get was an inequality. I'm not sure what to make of this.
EDIT Nov 13: OK, I figured out the mistake, disregard the above.
This cuts out a lot of what I said; I'll have to rewrite a lot! It also turns it into, well, more of an expository paper. I mean, I think it's some good exposition; I would still really like to see it published somewhere, because it summarizes and connects up some things that haven't been connected up elsewhere. But I'm going to need to find somewhere else to publish it, that's for sure.
Mind you, there still is the problem of finding an order-theoretic proof of these laws. Of course, that first requires an order-theoretic interpretation of a×b (Jacobsthal's multiplication) and a⊗b (super-Jacobsthal exponentiation).
But the former of those now does in fact exist! Take a look at this paper: Some iterated natural sums, by Paolo Lipparini. It gives an order-theoretic interpretation of the infinitary natural sum, and therefore, implicitly, Jacobsthal multiplication.
This order-theoretic interpretation does not make it immediately obvious that a×(b⊕c)=(a×b)⊕(a×c), nor that a×(b×c)=(a×b)×c; but just having an interpretation at all is a huge start. I have written to Lipparini and he agrees the problem is interesting.
One thing worth noting about this order-theoretic characterization of a×b is that while it makes it obvious that ab≤a×b, it doesn't make it obvious that a×b≤a⊗b. Of course, what Lipparini did wasn't meant specifically as an interpretation of a×b at all, but the generic infinitary natural sum, where you can't assume that all the summands are the same. It's possible that for the specific case of a×b, one might be able to find a reformulation of his characterization that does make this obvious. Of course, proving that this reformulation is the same might be far from easy! Who knows.
So, that's the state of things. Guess I've got quite a bit of work to do... (Well, I guess that's true regardless. In fact I might want to put off fixing this for now to get more writing up of integer complexity done.)
-Harry
