Constructive Mathematics and The Surprise Execution Paradox | Department of Mathematics

Constructive Mathematics and The Surprise Execution Paradox

Event Information
Event Location: 
GAB 461
Event Date: 
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - 5:00pm

A judge tells a prisoner, "You will be executed at noon on Monday or Tuesday of next week, but you will not know which day.'' The prisoner concludes that he will not be executed using a backward argument. We will investigate this paradox from the view of constructive mathematics and resolve it using Brouwer's weak continuity principle for natural numbers (WCN). We will also observe some striking consequences of WCN for metric spaces.