Theories with exactly three countable models and theories with algebraic prime models

Abstract

We prove first that if T is a countable complete theory with n(T), the number of countable models of T, equal to three, then T is similar to the Ehrenfeucht example of such a theory. Woodrow [4] showed that if T is in the same language as the Ehrenfeucht example, T has elimination of quantifiers, and n(T) = 3 then T is very much like this example. All known examples of theories T with n(T) finite and greater than one are based on the Ehrenfeucht example. We feel that such theories are a pathological case. Our second theorem strengthens the main result of [2]. The theorem in the present paper says that if T is a countable theory which has a model in which all the elements of some infinite definable set are algebraic of uniformly bounded degree, then n(T) ≥ 4. It is known [3] that if n(T) > 1, then n(T) > 3, so our result is the first nontrivial step towards proving that n(T) ≥ ℵ0. We would also like, of course, to prove the result without the uniform bound on the finite degrees of the elements in the subset.Theorem 2.1 is included in the author's Ph. D. thesis, as is a weaker version of Theorem 3.7. Thanks are due to Harry Simmons for his suggestions concerning the presentation of the material, and to Wilfrid Hodges for his advice while I was a Ph. D. student.