Deciding Predicate Logical Theories of Real-Valued Functions

Abstract

The notion of a real-valued function is central to mathematics, computer science, and many other scientific fields. Despite this importance, there are hardly any positive results on decision procedures for predicate logical theories that reason about real-valued functions. This paper defines a first-order predicate language for reasoning about multi-dimensional smooth real-valued functions and their derivatives, and demonstrates that - despite the obvious undecidability barriers - certain positive decidability results for such a language are indeed possible.