On Projective Ordinals

We study in this paper the projective ordinals δ^1_n, where δ^1_n = sup{ξ: ξ is the length of ɑ Δ^1_n prewellordering of the continuum}. These ordinals were introduced by Moschovakis in [8] to serve as a measure of the "definable length" of the continuum. We prove first in §2 that projective determinacy implies δ^1_n < δ^1_n for all even n > 0 (the same result for odd n is due to Moschovakis). Next, in the context of full determinacy, we partly generalize (in §3) the classical fact that δ^1_1 ℵ_l and the result of Martin that δ^1_3 = ℵ_(ω + 1) by proving that δ^1_(n2+1) = λ^+_(2n+1), where λ_(2n+1) is a cardinal of cofinality ω. Finally we discuss in §4 the connection between the projective ordinals and Solovay's uniform indiscernibles. We prove among other things that ∀α (α^# exists) implies that every δ^1_n with n ≥ 3 is a fixed point of the increasing enumeration of the uniform indiscernibles.