Beginnings

Abstract

The beginning threads of the subject are picked up in its early history. §1 discusses weak inaccessibility and Mahloness, concepts that arose in the study of cardinal limit processes, and their strong versions, which led to early speculations about completeness and consistency. §2 describes Ulam’s formulation of measurability, the most prominent of all large cardinal hypotheses, out of a measure problem for sets of reals. In §3 Gödel’s work on L, the beginning of axiomatic set theory as a distinctive field of mathematics, is reviewed since in both reaction and generalization it shaped much of the subsequent work in large cardinals. §4 discusses weak and strong compactness, concepts that emerged from Tarski’s study of infinitary languages, and establishes Hanf’s result, that in a strong sense there are many inaccessibles below a measurable cardinal. The focus of §5 is on elementary embeddings and the ultrapower construction: Scott’s pivotal result that if there is a measurable cardinal, then V ≠ L; the characterization of measurability in terms of ultrapowers and elementary embeddings; and the related notion of normality. And finally §6 discusses indescribability, a natural formalization of reflection phenomena in terms of higher-order languages that provided a schematic approach to comparing large cardinals by size.