Zest for both system and objectivity is the formal logician's original sin. He pays for it by constant frustrations and by living ofttimes the life of an intellectual outcaste. The task of squeezing a large body of stubborn facts into a more or less rigid system can be a painful one, especially since the facts of mathematics are among the most stubborn of all facts. Moreover, the more general and abstract we get, the farther removed we are from the raw mathematical experience. As intuition ceases to operate effectively, we fall into many unexpected traps. The formal logician gets little sympathy for his frustrations. He is regarded as too rigid by his philosophical colleagues and too speculative by his mathematical friends. The life of an intellectual outcaste may be a result partly of temperament and partly of the youthfulness of the logic profession. The unfortunate lack of wide appeal of logic may, however, be prolonged partly on account of the fact that very little of the well-established techniques of mathematics seems applicable to the treatment of serious problems of logic.

The axiomatic method is well suited to provide results which are both exact and systematic. How attractive would it be if we could get an axiom system in which all the axioms and deductions were intuitively clear and all theorems of mathematics were provable? Such a system would undoubtedly satisfy Descartes who admits solely intuition and deduction, which are, for him, the only “mental operations by which we are able, wholly without fear of illusion, to arrive at the knowledge of things.” Indeed, according to Descartes, intuition and deduction “are the most certain routes to knowledge, and the mind should admit no others. All the rest should be rejected as suspect of error and dangerous.”

A primitive-recursive sequence of rational numbers sn is said to be primitive-recursively irrational, if there are primitive recursive functions n(k), i(p, q) > 0 and N(p, q) such that:

1. (k)(n ≥ n(k) → ∣sn – sn(k)∣ < 2−k).

2. (p)(q)(q > 0 & n ≥ N(p, q) → ∣sn ± p/q∣ > 1/i(p, q)).

The object of the present note is to establish the primitive-recursive irrationality of a sequence which converges to π. In a previous paper we proved the primitive-recursive irrationality of the exponential series Σxn/n!, for all rational values of x, and showed that a primitive-(general-) recursively irrational sequence sn is strongly primitive-(general-)recursive convergent in any scale, where a recursive sequence sn is said to be strongly primitive-(general-)recursive convergent in the scale r (r ≥ 2), if there is a non-decreasing primitive-(general-) recursive function r(k) such that

,

where [x] is the greatest integer contained in x, i.e. [x] = i if i ≤ x < i + 1, [x] = —i if i ≤ —x < i+1, where i is a non-negative integer.

A rational recursive sequence sn is said to be recursive convergent, if there is a recursive function n(k) such that

.

If a sequence sn is strongly recursive convergent in a scale r, then it is recursive convergent and its limit is the recursive real number where, for any k ≥ 0,

.

In this paper a theorem will be established which states that a particular axiom of choice is equivalent to complete distributivity of union and intersection. The theorem will be formulated and proved in the system of logic of [4]. In addition to definitions of [4], the following will be used.

In terms of these definitions, the theorem can be formulated as follows.

The dual of this statement, obtained by interchanging I and U, is also a theorem and has a similar proof.