# Talk on Reverse Mathematics and the Modal Logic of Reverse Mathematics

This is a transcription of notes from a talk I gave on November 1, 2013 to the interdisciplinary logic seminar at the University of Connecticut. I gave a general introduction to Reverse Mathematics and then spoke about my work with Alaeddine Saadaoui and Sean Sovine on the logic of implications between subsystems in in Reverse Math. This post is essentially my speaking notes for the talk.

# Internal combinatorics and uniform reducibility

This post is a set of notes from a talk I gave on December 5th for the discrete mathematics seminar at Marshall University. I want to argue that logical analysis can reveal the “internal combinatorics” of theorems, using some recent results of Dorais, Dzafarov, Hirst, Mileti, and Shafer [DDHMS 2012] as a particular example of the process.
My first paper was “An incompleteness theorem for $\beta_n$ models” with Stephen Simpson [1]. It’s a short paper, but the idea is very pretty. We know that the incompleteness theorem implies there are strange models of arithmetic, but these models often seem mysterious, and it’s hard to see what useful properties they can have. But now suppose that a theory of the form $A+B$ meets the hypotheses of the incompleteness theorem, and moreover this theory proves its own consistency, so that $A+B$ is inconsistent. It follows that if $A$ is true (that is, true in the standard model) then $B$ must be false. In this way, we can use the incompleteness theorem to prove facts about the standard model rather than about nonstandard ones. The idea is originally due to Harvey Friedman in his thesis, I believe.