Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/iii/paper-24/6/b/ii/solution

The PDF's middle equality is , concerning ordinal exponentiation. The TeX incorrectly turns the exponent into a subscript; preserving would be incompatible with forcing CH over many ground models.
Let and use the countable-condition collapse of onto :
ordered by extension. Countable unions give lower bounds, so closed forcing adds no short ordinal sequences; in particular it adds no reals and preserves . Dense requirements ensure that the union of the generic filter is a total surjection . Thus
Finally forcing preserves ordinals, and the recursion defining ordinal multiplication and exponentiation is absolute. Both models compute as the same order type of successive copies of . This proves the printed middle equality too. Higher cardinals may collapse, which is allowed by the actual PDF.

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