/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14993266
>>14993268
anons, you MUST be joking.
I am not a scientist, but many physical phenomena can only be accurately described mathematically with tools that depend on some notion of infinite sets.
the other guy's argument is entirely v sound. especially the bit about numbers large enough that a physical representation cannot exist for them. that really does not stop us from admitting arbitrarily information-dense numbers as mathematical objects.
you wouldnt be able to set a finite upper bound on the quantity of integers, would you? or claim that there's some undiscovered last digit of pi?
it's really an odd perversion to include an additional axiom for sets, topological spaces, etc that they must be finite. there's no reason to do this, and practically all of math will break because of it.
real numbers are infinite. theyre constructed from cauchy sequences, which have infinitely many terms that become arbitrarily close to each other, and a real number is just a member of an equivalence class for some cauchy sequence. if you reject infinity as a mathematical concept, you will not only destroy the field and every worthwhile advancement in science, but do so nearly completely. infinity is used to some extent in not only calculus and linear algebra, but all forms of analysis, all forms of abstract algebra, topology, number theory, etc etc. even gradeschool algebra is done with sets that have no upper bound. all inductive proofs would be invalid, there would be no way to even reasonably define what the natural numbers are.
i promise you, mathematicians are not using this concept regularly and universally just to seem smart. i would not waste my life studying this stuff just to fool people into thinking im some esoteric genius by inventing fake, inconsistent, unusable gibberish. if i wanted to do that, i would have become an economist. please deeply reconsider this position.