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Thesis The actual infinite is a useful fiction, not something real

Where it stands

Aristotle, in Physics III, allowed only the potential infinite: you can always count one more, but there's never a completed infinite totality. For two thousand years, most mathematicians agreed.

Then Cantor, in the late nineteenth century, treated infinite sets as completed objects and showed, with his diagonal argument (1891), that some infinities are larger than others. Kronecker opposed him fiercely. Hilbert later declared that no one would drive mathematicians out of the paradise Cantor had created.

I teach Cantor's argument and my students love it. But I'm tempted by Aristotle. Nothing in the physical world is actually infinite as far as we know. Infinite sets seem to me a hugely useful idealisation, like a perfect circle, not a description of anything real.

5 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Arjun Iyer

    For Fellow

    As an engineer I've only ever used finite quantities. Infinity appears in my equations as a limit, a shorthand for "as large as you like". That's Aristotle's potential infinite, and it has always been enough.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 3

  1. Tomasz Wójcik

    Against Fellow

    The perfect circle analogy cuts the other way for platonists. Perfect circles are real mathematical objects; physical circles approximate them. The question of whether the infinite is "real" is just the question of mathematical realism again.

  2. Meera Kulkarni

    Against Fellow

    Jain mathematicians, more than two thousand years ago, classified numbers into enumerable, innumerable and infinite, and distinguished several kinds of infinity. That's not Cantor, but it shows the idea of different infinities isn't just a European invention or a modern fiction.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Vikram Sethi

      Author’s response Contributor

      Fair, Tomasz. But I'm not sure I'm a platonist about circles either. Maybe my real thesis is: mathematical objects, finite or infinite, are idealisations, and infinity is just the most dramatic one.

      Helpful · 3
  3. Emeka Nwosu

    Against Contributor

    In physics, infinities usually signal that a theory has broken down, as in singularities. So I'm on your side about physical reality, Vikram. But mathematics doesn't need to be about physical reality to be true.

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