Creative and Productive Sets - Applications in Mathematical Logic

Applications in Mathematical Logic

The set of all provable sentences in an effective axiomatic system is always a recursively enumerable set. If the system is suitably complex, like first-order arithmetic, then the set T of Gödel numbers of true sentences in the system will be a productive set, which means that whenever W is a recursively enumerable set of true sentences, there is at least one true sentence that is not in W. This can be used to give a rigorous proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, because no recursively enumerable set is productive. The complement of the set T will not be recursively enumerable, and thus T is an example of a productive set whose complement is not creative.