Sunday, August 5, 2012

There are no unanswerable questions in Euclidean Geometry

I guess we can delight or confuse our students by telling them that every question has an answer in Geometry (as they study it) but possibly not in their other math classes. From Wikipedia:
Tarski designed his system to facilitate its analysis via the tools of mathematical logic, i.e., to facilitate deriving its metamathematical properties. Tarski's system has the unusual property that all sentences can be written in universal-existential form, a special case of the prenex normal form. This form has all universal quantifiers preceding any existential quantifiers, so that all sentences can be recast in the form . This fact allowed Tarski to prove that Euclidean geometry is decidable: there exists an algorithm which can determine the truth or falsity of any sentence. Tarski's axiomatization is also complete. This does not contradict Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, because Tarski's theory lacks the expressive power needed to interpret Robinson arithmetic (Franzén 2005, pp. 25–26).
It would be sort of interesting to talk a little about geometry as dealing with thr intuitive notions of points, lines and space versus a purely logical deductive geometrical model as Tarski provides.