Computability and Randomness

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. In this volume, the eleventh publication in the Perspectives in Logic series, Manuel Lerman presents a systematic study of the interaction between local and global degree theory. He introduces the reader to the fascinating combinatorial methods of recursion theory while simultaneously showing how to use these methods to prove global theorems about degrees. The intended reader will have already taken a graduate-level course in recursion theory, but this book will also be accessible to those with some background in mathematical logic and a feeling for computability. It will prove a key reference to enable readers to easily locate facts about degrees and it will direct them to further results.

This book presents a unifying framework for using priority arguments to prove theorems in computability. Priority arguments provide the most powerful theorem-proving technique in the field, but most of the applications of this technique are ad hoc, masking the unifying principles used in the proofs. The proposed framework presented isolates many of these unifying combinatorial principles and uses them to give shorter and easier-to-follow proofs of computability-theoretic theorems. Standard theorems of priority levels 1, 2, and 3 are chosen to demonstrate the framework's use, with all proofs following the same pattern. The last section features a new example requiring priority at all finite levels. The book will serve as a resource and reference for researchers in logic and computability, helping them to prove theorems in a shorter and more transparent manner.