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How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#231
post #192

> How many real numbers exist? You might be tempted to say "lots". And you would be right, as far as that goes. But that doesn't satisfy a real mathematician. The question that immediately arises is whether "lots" is "enough". And that leads the better sort of mathematician inevitably to: "enough for what?" That is what mathematicians are deep in the middle of exploring, now. For example, when you are asked, "Does th…

Answering “Does this skirt make my butt look too big?” with something that “depends intimately on the true size of the set of real numbers” seems to be among the worst strategies.

The mathematics of infinities are nothing if not counterintuitive.

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some background on the proof [1]. Here's a video explaining it little better [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0

I guess I was focusing on the word "easy", heh.

Watch the video, its actually quite easy to follow.

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#233
post #91
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he resulting system is unsound (in the sense of Tarski) because it asserts the existence of natural numbers that have no "written form" (i.e. the existance of natural numbers that are larger than any term you can write to denote a natural number). Isn't that basically the definition of the natural numbers, ie. if you write down any natural number (say n) I can always construct a natural number that is larger than i…

This surprisingly doesn't mean repeatedly adding 1 will exhaust all natural numbers -- there are models for the natural numbers with elements that can't be reached this way! The ultrafilter construction gives one such model. You take the set of all sequences of natural numbers (n1, n2, n3, ...) then use an ultrafilter to decide which of these sequences are considered to be equal. The usual operations of natural numbe…

Can you explain what use these have? If natural numbers are (n, n, n, ...) then you have just made a new type of number not comparable to natural numbers.

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#234
post #233
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This surprisingly doesn't mean repeatedly adding 1 will exhaust all natural numbers -- there are models for the natural numbers with elements that can't be reached this way! The ultrafilter construction gives one such model. You take the set of all sequences of natural numbers (n1, n2, n3, ...) then use an ultrafilter to decide which of these sequences are considered to be equal. The usual operations of natural numbe…

Can you explain what use these have? If natural numbers are (n, n, n, ...) then you have just made a new type of number not comparable to natural numbers.

A theoretical use is that it shows that the axioms of the natural numbers (the Peano axioms) aren't enough to pin down what we think the natural numbers should be -- there are these crazy non-standard natural numbers out there!

In context of the discussion, this non-standard model of the natural numbers gives some intuition about what happens if the consistency of ZFC is independent of ZFC and you add in the axiom that ZFC is inconsistent: your natural numbers will have to be something similarly weird.

> you have just made a new type of number not comparable to natural numbers

But they are comparable. The everyday natural numbers are embedded in this new system, which is what these (n,n,n,...) elements represent. One way to interpret what we've done here is to add in infinities to the number system so that all the normal operations still work, and there's even a total ordering on them!

Using the real numbers instead of the naturals, you get the so-called nonstandard real numbers, which is the number system used in nonstandard analysis. Nonstandard analysis is a way to do analysis without epsilon-delta proofs. Nonstandard reals include infinitesimals and infinities, similar to nonstandard naturals having infinities. There are even textbooks on the subject -- I haven't read them, but they claim it makes analysis easier.

The last thing that comes to mind is that nonstandard numbers of this exact type show up when you study certain infinite-dimensional number systems and calculate the points (like in the end of my comment).

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do this in sophomore level Real Analysis. So as far as pure math goes, easy.

> sophomore level Real Analysis Hmm?

We did this first semester freshman year at my school in a single lecture in a 100 level "concepts of mathematics" course. I get that there's a certain amount of "it's hard to wrap your head around infinity" but really this proof is pretty well trodden by students not far into learning mathematics.

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#236
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sophomore level Real Analysis Hmm?

We did this first semester freshman year at my school in a single lecture in a 100 level "concepts of mathematics" course. I get that there's a certain amount of "it's hard to wrap your head around infinity" but really this proof is pretty well trodden by students not far into learning mathematics.

Which school?

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#237

Man there's a lot of juicy stuff in this article (Woodin's Ultimate L program gets briefly alluded to at the end of the article). I just want to point out, because the HN crowd seems to generally not be mathematical Platonists, that this entire article is implicitly assuming a Platonist philosophical foundation. This may cause confusion for lay readers who are not mathematical Platonists. In other words the article a…

> this entire article is implicitly assuming a Platonist philosophical foundation Is mathematical platonism still significant position between mathematicians? I thought it is outdated since Lobachevsky.

In this survey, most "Philosophers of mathematics" endorsed Platonism: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Target+facul...

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#239
post #192

> How many real numbers exist? You might be tempted to say "lots". And you would be right, as far as that goes. But that doesn't satisfy a real mathematician. The question that immediately arises is whether "lots" is "enough". And that leads the better sort of mathematician inevitably to: "enough for what?" That is what mathematicians are deep in the middle of exploring, now. For example, when you are asked, "Does th…

"Does this skirt make my butt look too big?" "Too big for what?" Yeah let me know how that works out.

Yes, the call for more experimentation to keep theorists honest.

Re: How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer

#240

You can map all the real numbers to the interval 0 0.0 => 0 0.1 => 1 0.2 => 2 ... 0.14159 => 95141 The argument against this is that there are real numbers with an infinite number of digits, which will not have a specific integer associated with them. Or do they? Can there be an "infinitely large integer?" or are there just infinitely many of them? I think this question gets to the core of the problem.

> Can there be an "infinitely large integer?"

Check out p-adic numbers (https://math.uchicago.edu/~tghyde/Hyde%20--%20Introduction%2...), which are related to the two's-complement representation of signed integers. For example, in the 10-adic numbers, ...9999 + 1 = 0.

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