FOM: New book

[Harvey Friedman]

Sazonov 5:32PM 8/31/98 writes:

>The resulting formal system proves to be
>*feasibly consistent* in the sense that there exists no formal
>proof of feasible length (say, proof written in a book) which
>leads to a contradiction. It is Rohit Parikh who introduced (in
>his paper in JSL, 1971) this, still rather NEW AND UNFORTUNATELY
>COMPLETELY UNEXPLORED IN F.O.M.  UNDERSTANDING OF CONSISTENCY OF
>A FORMAL SYSTEM.

The FOM may be interested in the new Handbook of Proof Theory, editor Sam
Buss, that has just come out from North-Holland. There is an extensive
article there by Pudlak on the lengths of proofs, including my early result
which I called "finite Godel's theorem" concerning how many steps are
needed to prove in T that T has no inconsistency of size <= n.