Long Borel Hierarchies
Abstract
Description
We show that it is relatively consistent with ZF that the Borel hierarchy on the reals has length $ω_2$. This implies that $ω_1$ has countable cofinality, so the axiom of choice fails very badly in our model. A similar argument produces models of ZF in which the Borel hierarchy has length any given limit ordinal less than $ω_2$, e.g., $ω$ or $ω_1+ω_1$.
Latex2e: 24 pages plus 8 page appendix Latest version at: www.math.wisc.edu/~miller