Papers › Connecting Constructive Notions of Ordinals in Homotopy Type Theory
Connecting Constructive Notions of Ordinals in Homotopy Type Theory
Nicolai Kraus, Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg, Chuangjie Xu
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
In classical set theory, there are many equivalent ways to introduce ordinals. In a constructive setting, however, the different notions split apart, with different advantages and disadvantages for each. We consider three different notions of ordinals in homotopy type theory, and show how they relate to each other: A notation system based on Cantor normal forms, a refined notion of Brouwer trees (inductively generated by zero, successor and countable limits), and wellfounded extensional orders. For Cantor normal forms, most properties are decidable, whereas for wellfounded extensional transitive orders, most are undecidable. Formulations for Brouwer trees are usually partially decidable. We demonstrate that all three notions have properties expected of ordinals: their order relations, although defined differently in each case, are all extensional and wellfounded, and the usual arithmetic operations can be defined in each case. We connect these notions by constructing structure preserving embeddings of Cantor normal forms into Brouwer trees, and of these in turn into wellfounded extensional orders. We have formalised most of our results in cubical Agda.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections