From Hypothesis Testing to Estimating Functionals

Abstract

This chapter prepares the reader's mind for reverse mathematics. As its name suggests, reverse mathematics seeks not theorems but the right axioms to prove theorems already known. Reverse mathematics began as a technical field of mathematical logic, but its main ideas have precedents in the ancient field of geometry and the early twentieth-century field of set theory. In geometry, the parallel axiom is the right axiom to prove many theorems of Euclidean geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem. Set theory offers a more modern example: base theory called ZF, a theorem that ZF cannot prove (the well-ordering theorem) and the “right axiom” for proving it—the axiom of choice. From these and similar examples one can guess at a base theory for analysis, and the “right axioms” for proving some of its well-known theorems.