The Independence of the General Continuum Hypothesis

This paper is divided into four sections. The first section (this section) briefly reviews topics that will be required for the rest of the paper. The second section covers the proof of Gödel’s theorem that the generalized continuum hypothesis cannot be disproved in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The third section simply states the proof of Cohen’s theorem that the generalized continuum hypothesis cannot be proved in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The final section uses these two theorems to conclude that the generalized continuum hypothesis is undecidable in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.