Franco Montagna, a prominent logician and one of the leaders of the Italian school on Mathematical Logic, passed away on February 18, 2015. We survey some of his results and ideas in the two disciplines he greatly contributed along his career: provability logic and many-valued logic.

We determine the strictly positive fragment \(\textsf{QPL}^+(\textsf{HA})\) of the quantified provability logic \(\textsf{QPL}(\textsf{HA})\) of Heyting Arithmetic. We show that \(\textsf{QPL}^+(\textsf{HA})\) is decidable and that it coincides with \(\textsf{QPL}^+(\textsf{PA})\), which is the strictly positive fragment of the quantified provability logic of of Peano Arithmetic. This positively resolves a previous conjecture of the authors described in [ 14 ]. On our way to proving these results, we carve out the strictly positive fragment \(\textsf{PL}^+(\textsf{HA})\) of the provability logic \(\textsf{PL}(\textsf{HA})\) of Heyting Arithmetic, provide (...) a simple axiomatization, and prove it to be sound and complete for two types of arithmetical interpretations. The simple fragments presented in this paper should be contrasted with a recent result by Mojtahedi [ 43 ], where an axiomatization for \(\textsf{PL}(\textsf{HA})\) is provided. This axiomatization, although decidable, is of considerable complexity. (shrink)

-/- Provability logic is a modal logic that is used to investigate what arithmetical theories can express in a restricted language about their provability predicates. The logic has been inspired by developments in meta-mathematics such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems of 1931 and Löb’s theorem of 1953. As a modal logic, provability logic has been studied since the early seventies, and has had important applications in the foundations of mathematics. -/- From a philosophical point of view, provability logic is interesting because (...) the concept of provability in a fixed theory of arithmetic has a unique and non-problematic meaning, other than concepts like necessity and knowledge studied in modal and epistemic logic. Furthermore, provability logic provides tools to study the notion of self-reference. (shrink)

Predicate modal formulas with non-modalized quantifiers (call them Q-formulas) are considered as schemata of arithmetical formulas, where is interpreted as the provability predicate of some fixed correct extension T of arithmetic. A method of constructing 1) non-provable in T and 2) false arithmetical examples for Q-formulas by Kripke-like countermodels of certain type is given. Assuming the means of T to be strong enough to solve the (undecidable) problem of derivability in QGL, the Q-fragment of the predicate version of the logic (...) GL, we prove the recursive enumerability of the sets of Q-formulas all arithmetical examples of which are: 1) T-provable, 2) true. In. particular, the first one is shown to be exactly QGL and the second one to be exactly the Q-fragment of the predicate version of Solovay's logic S. (shrink)

Predicate modal formulas are considered as schemata of arithmetical formulas, where is interpreted as the standard formula of provability in a fixed sufficiently rich theory T in the language of arithmetic. QL T(T) and QL T are the sets of schemata of T-provable and true formulas, correspondingly. Solovay's well-known result — construction an arithmetical counterinterpretation by Kripke countermodel — is generalized on the predicate modal language; axiomatizations of the restrictions of QL T(T) and QL T by formulas, which contain no (...) variables different from x, are given by means of decidable prepositional bimodal systems; under the assumption that T is 1-complete, there is established the enumerability of the restrictions of QL T(T) and QL T by: 1) formulas in which the domains of different occurrences of don't intersect and 2) formulas of the form n A. (shrink)