## 117b – Undecidability and Incompleteness – Lecture 4

February 1, 2007

We showed that $a=n!$ is Diophantine. This implies that the prime numbers are Diophantine. Therefore, there is a polynomial in several variables with integer coefficients whose range, when intersected with the natural numbers, coincides with the set of primes. Amusingly, no nonconstant polynomial with integer coefficients can only take prime values.

We proved the bounded quantifier lemma, the last technical component of the proof of the undecidability of Hilbert’s tenth problem. It implies that the class of relations definable by a $\Sigma^0_1$ formula in the structure $({\mathbb N},+,\times,<,0,1)$ coincides with the class of $\Sigma_1$ relations (i.e., the Diophantine ones).

To complete the proof of the undecidability of the tenth problem, we will show that any c.e. relation is Diophantine. For this, recall that a set is c.e. iff it is the domain of a Turing machine. We proceeded to code the behavior of Turing machines by means of a Diophantic representation. This involves coding configurations of Turing machines and it remains to show how to code the way one configuration changes into another one.