In mathematics, Takeuti's conjecture is the conjecture of Gaisi Takeuti that a sequent formalisation of second-order logic has cut-elimination (Takeuti 1953). It was settled positively:
- By Tait, using a semantic technique for proving cut-elimination, based on work by Schütte (Tait 1966);
- Independently by Prawitz (Prawitz 1968) and Takahashi (Takahashi 1967) by a similar technique (Takahashi 1967) - although Prawitz's and Takahashi's proofs are not limited to second-order logic, but concern higher-order logics in general;
- It is a corollary of Jean-Yves Girard's syntactic proof of strong normalization for System F.
Takeuti's conjecture is equivalent to the consistency of second-order arithmetic in the sense that each of the statements can be derived from each other in the weak system PRA; consistency refers here to the truth of the Gödel sentence for second-order arithmetic. It is also equivalent to the strong normalization of the Girard/Reynold's System F.
See also
References
- Dag Prawitz, 1968. Hauptsatz for higher order logic. J. Symb. Log., 33:452–457, 1968.
- William W. Tait, 1966. A nonconstructive proof of Gentzen's Hauptsatz for second order predicate logic. In Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 72:980–983.
- Gaisi Takeuti, 1953. On a generalized logic calculus. In Japanese Journal of Mathematics, 23:39–96. An errata to this article was published in the same journal, 24:149–156, 1954.
- Moto-o Takahashi, 1967. A proof of cut-elimination in simple type theory. In Japanese Mathematical Society, 10:44–45.