Abstract. There is a common perception by which small numbers are considered more concrete and large numbers more abstract. A mathematical formalization of this idea was introduced by Parikh (1971) through an inconsistent theory of feasible numbers in which addition and multiplication are as usual but for which some very large number is defined to be not feasible. Parikh shows that sufficiently short proofs in this theory can only prove true statements of arithmetic. We pursue these topics in light of logical flow graphs of proofs (Buss, 1991) and show that Parikh’s lower bound for concrete consistency reflects the presence of cycles in the logical graphs of short proofs of feasibility of large numbers. We discuss two concrete constructions which show the bound to be optimal and bring out the dynamical aspect of formal proofs. For this paper the concept of feasible numbers has two roles, as an idea with its own life and as a vehicle for exploring general principles on the dynamics and geometry of proofs. Cycles can be seen as a measure of how complicated a proof can be. We prove that short proofs must have cycles. 1.

Introduction The structure of LK proofs presents intriguing combinatorial aspects which turn out to be very difficult to study [6,8]. It is well-known that as soon as one wants to intervene over the structure of a proof to simplify it, the complexity of the proof might increase enormously [16,12,14]. There is a link between the presence of cut formulas with nested quantifiers and the non-elementary expansion needed to prove a theorem without the help of such formulas. If one considers the graph defined by tracing the flow of occurrences of formulas (in the sense of [2]) for proofs allowing a non-elementary compression, one Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint 7 November 1997 finds that such graphs contain cycles [5] or almost cyclic structures[6]. These cycles codify in a small space (i.e. a proof with a small number of lines) all the information which is present in the proof once cuts on formulas wit