How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
FALSE: implies
Statement
FALSE. Ordinal addition (Ordinal addition ) is strictly increasing in its left argument:
What is true is the weak inequality , which is claim (c) of Monotonicity of ordinal and : strictly increasing and continuous in the right argument, weakly increasing in the left, with left cancellation, and the identities and . The strict version fails already at , , , so the weak form is best possible. Right cancellation fails with it: with .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The ordinals with the operation of Ordinal addition , and the least limit ordinal ( is the least limit ordinal, Successor and limit ordinals).
, , and for limit (Ordinal addition ).
(claim (a) of Monotonicity of ordinal and : strictly increasing and continuous in the right argument, weakly increasing in the left, with left cancellation, and the identities and ) and (claim (c) of the same).
is a limit ordinal, so ( is the least limit ordinal, Successor and limit ordinals); every ordinal is transitive, iff or , and (Ordinal (von Neumann), Basic closure properties of ordinals, Trichotomy and well-ordering of the ordinals); and , so .
Refutation
For every the ordinal lies in by [L3], hence by [L4]; and by [L2], hence .
by [L2].
by [L1], and that union equals : it is contained in because each by step 1.1, and it contains because by [L4] and each by step 1.1.
So while , which refutes the strict inequality and also refutes right cancellation, since .
Remarks
Why the left argument is the weak side. The recursion of Ordinal addition runs on the right argument, and at a limit it takes a supremum; a finite head placed on the left is swallowed by that supremum. Concretely, prepending finitely many points to a copy of gives a copy of again. On the right nothing is swallowed, and there the inequality really is strict, which is claim (b) of Monotonicity of ordinal and : strictly increasing and continuous in the right argument, weakly increasing in the left, with left cancellation, and the identities and .
How much can be lost on the left. As much as one likes below the limit: for every , by the same computation as step 2.1 with replaced by . So the map is constant on and collapses infinitely many values.
Left cancellation is unaffected. still forces , because addition is strictly increasing in the right argument. The two cancellation laws are not a package, and this item is exactly the difference.
Depends on
Ordinal addition
Monotonicity of ordinal and : strictly increasing and continuous in the right argument, weakly increasing in the left, with left cancellation, and the identities and
On the ordinal and are the Peano operations: is closed under ordinal , and exponentiation, and for naturals the ordinal and are the natural-number sum and product
is the least limit ordinal
Successor and limit ordinals
Basic closure properties of ordinals
Trichotomy and well-ordering of the ordinals
Ordinal (von Neumann)