Cardinal Arithmetic

Setting a new direction in research in the subject, this book presents a new view of cardinal arithmetic, one of the central issues in set theory. Focusing on cofinalities rather than cardinalities, new results are obtained and published here for the first time.

Is the continuum hypothesis still open? If we interpret it as finding the laws of cardinal arithmetic (really exponentiation since addition and multiplication were classically solved), it was thought to be essentially solved by the independence results of Gödel and Cohen (and Easton) with some isolated positive results (like Galvin-Hajnal). It was expected that only more independence results remained to be proved.The author has come to change his view: we should stress Π]*N0 (not 2]Π) and mainly look at the cofinalities rather than cardinalities, in particular pp (μ), pcf (α). Their properties are investigated here and conventional cardinal arithmetic is reduced to 2]*N (*N - regular, cases totally independent) and various cofinalities. This enables us to get new results for the conventional cardinal arithmetic, thus supporting the interest in our view. We also find other applications, extend older methods of using normal fiters and prove the existence of Jonsson algebra.