[FOM] Expanded ordinal calculator is available

[Paul Budnik]

Version 0.2 of the ordinal calculator has been released. In addition to 
bug fixes it adds support for notations for countable ordinals greater 
than the ordinal of the recursive ordinals. These are used in a form of 
collapsing to define large recursive ordinals.

An analog of recursive ordinal notations is constructed for larger 
countable ordinals using recursive functions on incomplete domains. For 
recursive ordinals a recursive function on the integers , 
`limitElement', is defined for each notation alpha. The union of the 
ordinals represented by alpha.limitElement(n) for every integer n is the 
ordinal represented  by alpha. For larger ordinals a similar purpose is 
served by function `limitOrd'.  This accepts ordinal notations of a 
given type (such as recursive ordinal) as input. The domain of 
`limitOrd' is necessarily incomplete within the computational model. In 
writing programs to evaluate ordinal expressions beyond the recursive 
ordinals one is compelled to build incompleteness in from the ground up. 
There are programming language constructs like C++ subclasses and 
virtual functions that facilitate this.

A form of collapsing is used that `freezes' the ordinal notation system 
at a given point. This allows the embedding of this frozen structure to 
expand the notations for recursive ordinals. This leads to notations for 
recursive ordinals a bit beyond the Bachmann-Howard ordinal. This 
approach can be generalized further. It is documented in the paper "A 
Computational Approach to the Ordinal Numbers: Documents ordCalc0.2".

Documentation, complete source code and Windows installer are available 
at www.mtnmath.com/ord and https://sourceforge.net/projects/ord

Paul Budnik
www.mtnmath.com