Talk:Bourbaki–Witt theorem

If someone could elaborate on the applications of Bourbaki-Witt to computer science, along with any others it might have, it would be much appreciated. I don't know all that much about it other than the basic set theoretic stuff.

There is a little about this at Knaster-Tarski theorem. Usually things like that go on in domain theory. Charles Matthews 19:41, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The analysis of the countable special case doesn't seem quite right to me. In particular, surely

If X is countable then a similar argument, along with the completeness of X, shows that the sequence {x_n} has a least upper bound x_∞, which is a fixed point of f. It is helpful to think of x_∞ as the limit of the sequence.

doesn't always hold? e.g. if X is the ordinal ω+ω+1, and f is the successor function on ω+ω and the identity on the last 1, then the initial sequence {x_n} is just {1,2,3,…}, with limit x_∞ = ω, which isn't yet a fixed point. So in the countable special case, we may still need to go to transfinite iterates of f (and indeed we may need any countable order-type).

If this isn't disputed, I'll remove that line, and change the section to be just the finite special case. Pit-trout (talk) 14:10, 26 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This article is NOT about the Bourbaki--Witt proof

Here is my translation of the 1949 Bourbaki paper: https://paultaylor.eu/trans/

In fact the proof had been given by Zermelo as his Second Proof of the Well Ordering Theorem in 1908.

What this Wikipedia page says is **not** the proof in the papers by Bourbaki, Witt or Zermelo. I would suggest **reading** those papers, because they contain a much neater proof. (In fact, it's not even a "proof", because it doesn't cite the Recursion Theorem due to John von Neumann that justifies transfinite recursion, or Hartogs' Lemma that tells you when to stop.) Also, there's now an intuitionistic proof of the result, due to Dito Pataraia. See http://mathoverflow.net/questions/362038 for more details of these comments.

For my own work related to this topic, see http://paultaylor.eu/ordinals

I have forgotten my Wikipedia login.

46.33.143.125 (talk) 08:59, 25 July 2021 (UTC)Paul Taylor[reply]