The inconsistencies involved in the foundation of set theory were invariably caused by infinity and self-reference; and only with the opportune axiomatic restrictions could them be obviated. Throughout history, both concepts have proved to be an exha
ustible source of paradoxes and contradictions. It seems therefore legitimate to pose some questions concerning their formal consistency. This is just the objective of this paper. Starting from an extension of Cantors paradox that suggests the inconsistency of the actual infinity, the paper makes a short review of its controversial history and proposes a new way of criticism based on w-order. Self-reference is also examined from a critique perspective which includes syntactic and semantic considerations. The critique affects the formal sentence involved in Godels first incompleteness theorem and its ordinary language interpretation.
We introduce a topological object, called hairy Cantor set, which in many ways enjoys the universal features of objects like Jordan curve, Cantor set, Cantor bouquet, hairy Jordan curve, etc. We give an axiomatic characterisation of hairy Cantor sets
, and prove that any two such objects in the plane are ambiently homeomorphic. Hairy Cantor sets appear in the study of the dynamics of holomorphic maps with infinitely many renormalisation structures. They are employed to link the fundamental concepts of polynomial-like renormalisation by Douady-Hubbard with the arithmetic conditions obtained by Herman-Yoccoz in the study of the dynamics of analytic circle diffeomorphisms.
We obtain the rectifiability of the graph of a bounded variation homeomorphism $f$ in the plane and relations between gradients of $f$ and its inverse. Further, we show an example of a bounded variation homeomorphism $f$ in the plane which satisfie
s the $(N)$ and $(N^{-1})$ properties and strict positivity of Jacobian of both itself and its inverse, but neither $f$ nor $f^{-1}$ is Sobolev.
This paper examines the possibilities of extending Cantors two arguments on the uncountable nature of the set of real numbers to one of its proper denumerable subsets: the set of rational numbers. The paper proves that, unless certain restrictive con
ditions are satisfied, both extensions are possible. It is therefore indispensable to prove that those conditions are in fact satisfied in Cantors theory of transfinite sets. Otherwise that theory would be inconsistent.
In 1903, noted puzzle-maker Henry Dudeney published The Spider and the Fly puzzle, which asks for the shortest path along the surfaces of a square prism between two points (source and target) located on the square faces, and surprisingly showed that
the shortest path traverses five faces. Dudeneys source and target points had very symmetrical locations; in this article, we allow the source and target points to be anywhere in the interior of opposite faces, but now require the square prism to be a cube. In this context, we find that, depending on source and target locations, a shortest path can traverse either three or four faces, and we investigate the conditions that lead to four-face solutions and estimate the probability of getting a four-face shortest path. We utilize a combination of numerical calculations, elementary geometry, and transformations we call corner moves of cube unfolding diagrams,