Towards a Physically Meaningful Definition of Computable Discontinuous and Multi-valued Functions (Constraints)

Abstract

In computable mathematics, there are known definitions of computable numbers, computable metric spaces, computable compact sets, and computable functions. A traditional definition of a computable function, however, covers only continuous functions. In many applications (e.g., in phase transitions), physical phenomena are described by discontinuous or multi-valued functions (a.k.a. constraints). In this paper, we provide a physics-motivated definition of computable discontinuous and multi-valued functions, and we analyze properties of this definition.