FOM: Priority

[Insall]

Apparently, the circumstances in which I have been posting some of my old
results may be misinterpreted.  When I wrote:  ``These are quite nice, and
related to work I have done years ago...'', I did not intend to even appear
to claim to have priority on the results posted by professor Friedman.  In
particular, I was not proving equivalents with large cardinals.


I am, however, glad to see that results in universal algebra that relate to
foundational considerations are being considered by Harvey, for when I was
working on that dissertation, which aimed specifically at the applications
of nonstandard proof methods to finiteness conditions in universal algebra,
I also attended the 1988 AMS Centennial Celebration, at which he spoke about
the fact that several results in areas of ``normal'' mathematics require
significant foundational machinery for formal proofs.  This much at the time
fascinated me, and I hoped to one day understand enough of it to work on
similar problems.  I am not sure that I am there yet, but the relationships
I feel pertain between results I have either worked on or published since
that time and those in Harvey's excellent recent posting give me some hope
that I may be closer to the point where I can understand what should be done
in this  ``reverse mathematics'' by me.



Matt Insall
insall at umr.edu
(573)341-4901
montez at rollanet.org
(573)467-0948

Associate Professor of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Missouri - Rolla
Rolla Missouri - USA

Where I ocassionally see a rainbow, or a bluebird, and the smiles on
children's faces are on the backdrop of the rolling Ozark foothills.