The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic Volume 23, Number 1, March 2017
IN SEARCH OF ULTIMATE-L THE 19TH MIDRASHA MATHEMATICAE LECTURES
W. HUGH WOODIN
Abstract. We give a fairly complete account which first shows that the solution to the inner model problem for one supercompact cardinal will yield an ultimate version of L and then shows that the various current approaches to inner model theory must be fundamentally altered to provide that solution.
§1. Introduction. The Inner Model Program began with Godel’s¨ discov- ery of L which in the modern view is the first inner model. Of course it was Scott’s Theorem, that if V = L then there are no measurable cardinals, which set the stage for the necessity of the Inner Model Program. By the early 1970s, the problem to extend the Inner Model Program to the level of supercompact cardinals had emerged as a key problem and the expectation was that in solving this problem the way would be open to extend the solution to much stronger large cardinals. The constructions of Kunen, solving the inner model problem for measurable cardinals, were generalized to solve the inner model problem at the level of Woodin cardinals in series of results driven primarily by seminal constructions of Mitchell and Steel and building on earlier work of Mitchell which had solved the inner model problem for strong cardinals.1 The levels of Woodin cardinals represent key stages for the inner model program because the internal definability of the wellordering of the reals becomes progressively more complicated through the emergence of determinacy consequences. By the year 2000, the Inner Model Program had been unconditionally extended by Neeman, [14], to the level of Woodin cardinals which are limits of strong cardinals and conditionally extended, [18], to the level of super- strong cardinals. The latter constructions require not only large cardinal hypotheses (an obvious necessity) but also iteration hypotheses which are abstract combinatorial hypotheses for iterating countable elementary sub- structures of rank initial segments of V . These basic hypotheses were first defined and analyzed by Martin and Steel.
Received September 4, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 03E45, 03E55, 03E60. 1See [6] for a far more thorough and elegant historical account.