On the Decidability of Monadic Second-Order Logic with Arithmetic Predicates

We investigate the decidability of the monadic second-order (MSO) theory of the structure N;<,P₁, …,Pₖ, for various unary predicates P₁,…,Pₖ ⊆ N. We focus in particular on "arithmetic" predicates arising in the study of linear recurrence sequences, such as fixed-base powers Powₖ = ⁿ : n ∈ N\, k-th powers Nₖ = ᵏ : n ∈ N\, and the set of terms of the Fibonacci sequence Fib = \0,1,2,3,5,8,13,…\ (and similarly for other linear recurrence sequences having a single, non-repeated, dominant characteristic root). We obtain several new unconditional and conditional decidability results, a select sample of which are the following: • The MSO theory of N;<,Pow₂, Fib is decidable; • The MSO theory of N;<, Pow₂, Pow₃, Pow₆ is decidable; • The MSO theory of N;<, Pow₂, Pow₃, Pow₅ is decidable assuming Schanuel's conjecture; • The MSO theory of N;<, Pow₄, N₂ is decidable; • The MSO theory of N;<, Pow₂, N₂ is Turing-equivalent to the MSO theory of N;<,S, where S is the predicate corresponding to the binary expansion of √2. (As the binary expansion of √2 is widely believed to be normal, the corresponding MSO theory is in turn expected to be decidable.) These results are obtained by exploiting and combining techniques from dynamical systems, number theory, and automata theory.