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Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007) [1] was an American mathematician. He is best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal.
Kurt Gödel proved in 1940 that the negation of the continuum hypothesis, i.e., the existence of a set with intermediate cardinality, could not be proved in standard set theory. [2] The second half of the independence of the continuum hypothesis – i.e., unprovability of the nonexistence of an intermediate-sized set – was proved in 1963 by ...
Set theory as conceived by Georg Cantor assumes the existence of infinite sets. As this assumption cannot be proved from first principles it has been introduced into axiomatic set theory by the axiom of infinity, which asserts the existence of the set N of natural numbers. Every infinite set which can be enumerated by natural numbers is the ...
Cohen's kappa measures the agreement between two raters who each classify N items into C mutually exclusive categories. The definition of is =, where p o is the relative observed agreement among raters, and p e is the hypothetical probability of chance agreement, using the observed data to calculate the probabilities of each observer randomly selecting each category.
Forcing adjoins to some given model of set theory additional sets in order to create a larger model with properties determined (i.e. "forced") by the construction and the original model. For example, Cohen's construction adjoins additional subsets of the natural numbers without changing any of the cardinal numbers of the original
A choice function (also called selector or selection) is a function f, defined on a collection X of nonempty sets, such that for every set A in X, f (A) is an element of A. With this concept, the axiom can be stated: Axiom— For any set X of nonempty sets, there exists a choice function f that is defined on X and maps each set of X to an ...
A Venn diagram is a widely used diagram style that shows the logical relation between sets, popularized by John Venn (1834–1923) in the 1880s. The diagrams are used to teach elementary set theory, and to illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science.
Minimal model (set theory) In set theory, a branch of mathematics, the minimal model is the minimal standard model of ZFC . The minimal model was introduced by Shepherdson ( 1951, 1952, 1953) and rediscovered by Cohen (1963) . The existence of a minimal model cannot be proved in ZFC, even assuming that ZFC is consistent, but follows from the ...