Degree and holomorphic extendibility

Recently it was shown that if D is a bounded domain in ℂ whose boundary consists of a finite number of pairwise disjoint simple closed curves, then a continuous function f on bD extends holomorphically through D if and only if, for each g ∈ A(D) such that f + g has no zero on bD, the degree of f + g is non-negative (which, for these special domains, is equivalent to the fact that the change of argument of f + g along bD is non-negative). Here A(D) is the algebra of all continuous functions on D which are holomorphic on D. This fails to hold for general domains, and generalizing to more general domains presents a major problem that often requires a much larger class of functions g. It is shown that the preceding theorem still holds in the case when D is a bounded domain in ℂ such that D is finitely connected and such that D is equal to the interior of D.

Two further combinatorial theorems equivalent to the 1-consistency of peano arithmetic

We give two new finite combinatorial statements which are independent of Peano arithmetic, using the methods of Kirby and Paris [6] and Paris [12]. Both are in fact equivalent over Peano arithmetic (denoted by P) to its 1-consistency. The first involves trees and the second linear orderings. Both were “motivated” by anti-basis theorems of Clote (cf. [1], [2]). The one involving trees, however, is not unrelated to the Kirby-Paris characterization of strong cuts in terms of the tree property [6], but, in fact, comes directly from König's lemma, of which it is a miniaturization. (See the remark preceding Theorem 3 below.) The resulting combinatorial statement is easily seen to imply the independent statement discovered by Mills [11], but it is not clear how to show their equivalence over Peano arithmetic without going through 1-consistency. The one involving linear orderings miniaturizes the property of infinite sets X that any linear ordering of X is isomorphic to ω or ω* on some infinite subset of X. Both statements are analogous to Example 2 of [12] and involve the notion of dense [12] or relatively large [14] finite set.We adopt the notations and definitions of [6] and [12]. We shall in particular have need of the notions of semiregular, regular and strong initial segments and of indicators.