Under the hypothesis of Paris models are well-founded when their complete theory has a well-founded model, a Paris model is well-founded. Every automorphism of is then the identity by external epsilon induction: once all members of are fixed, extensionality gives . Hence is a rigid first-order structure.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2023 ii Paper 1 16H b ii Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
No. Take and let be the theory of linear orders. It has finite models of every positive size. Every finite linear order is a rigid first-order structure: an order automorphism fixes the least element, then the next element, and inductively every element.
However, is an infinite model of and is not rigid. For example,is a nonidentity order automorphism. Hence arbitrarily large rigid finite models do not force all infinite models to be rigid.