Concept
In the mathematical discipline of set theory, there are many ways of describing specific countable ordinals. The smallest ones can be usefully and non-circularly expressed in terms of their Cantor normal forms. Beyond that, many ordinals of relevance to proof theory still have computable ordinal notations (see ordinal analysis). However, it is not possible to decide effectively whether a given putative ordinal notation is a notation or not (for reasons somewhat analogous to the unsolvability of the halting problem); various more-concrete ways of defining ordinals that definitely have notations are available. Since there are only countably many notations, all ordinals with notations are exhausted well below the first uncountable ordinal ω1; their supremum is called Church–Kleene ω1 or ω (not to be confused with the first uncountable ordinal, ω1), described below. Ordinal numbers below ω are the recursive ordinals (see below). Countable ordinals larger than this may still be defined, but do not have notations. Due to the focus on countable ordinals, ordinal arithmetic is used throughout, except where otherwise noted. The ordinals described here are not as large as the ones described in large cardinals, but they are large among those that have constructive notations (descriptions). Larger and larger ordinals can be defined, but they become more and more difficult to describe. Recursive ordinal Ordinal notation Recursive ordinals (or computable ordinals) are certain countable ordinals: loosely speaking those represented by a computable function. There are several equivalent definitions of this: the simplest is to say that a computable ordinal is the order-type of some recursive (i.e., computable) well-ordering of the natural numbers; so, essentially, an ordinal is recursive when we can present the set of smaller ordinals in such a way that a computer (Turing machine, say) can manipulate them (and, essentially, compare them). A different definition uses Kleene's system of ordinal notations.