Talk:Veblen ordinal

Merge Small/Large

Might it be be preferable to have one article on 'Veblen ordinal' incorporating the two current (and rather small) articles on Large and Small in lieu of this disambiguation page? Zero sharp (talk) 16:06, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, and there is also the text I wrote on constructing an ordinal collapsing function which should be merged somewhere, I guess (I didn't get any answers to my call for suggestions on where/how to insert it, unfortunately) — this is relevant to the Veblen ordinals in that it helps to see them at their appropriate place. I would suggest having one article for "predicatively defined ordinals", which would merge the Veblen functions (extended to finitely many, then transfinitely many variables — this is perhaps Schütte's Klammersymbol but I'm not sure), the (not very notable) Ackermann ordinal, and the small and large Veblen ordinals; and then a second article for "ordinal collapsing", which would merge in my above-mentioned description, thus describing the Bachmann-Howard ordinal in detail, and then go on to mention some even larger proof-theoretic ordinals such as Rathjen's collapsing of a weakly compact cardinal. Does this sound right? I guess I'll suggest it on the large countable ordinal talk page. --Gro-Tsen (talk) 10:03, 12 April 2008 (UTC)