Related papers: Infinity - A simple, but not too simple introducti…
I am going to compare well-known properties of infinite words with those of infinite permutations, a new object studied since middle 2000s. Basically, it was Sergey Avgustinovich who invented this notion, although in an early study by Davis…
The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…
We provide a formal introduction into the classic theorems of general topology and its axiomatic foundations in set theory. In this second part we introduce the fundamental concepts of topological spaces, convergence, and continuity, as…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
As far as algebraic properties are concerned, the usual addition on the class of ordinal numbers is not really well behaved; for example, it is not commutative, nor left cancellative etc. In a few cases, the natural Hessemberg sum is a…
This paper provides some counterexamples to Cantor's contributions to the foundations of Set Theory. The first counterexample forces Cantor's Diagonal Method (DM) to yield one of the numbers in the target list. To study this anomaly, and…
The stipulation that no measurable quantity could have an infinite value is indispensable in physics. At the same time, in mathematics, the possibility of considering an infinite procedure as a whole is usually taken for granted. However,…
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
A sketch of some of the fundamental notions related to the nature of knowledge is offered, with special focus on the role of mathematics and my own opinions. No single idea exposed here is entirely original; indeed, this topic has been…
Some relations between physics and finitary and infinitary mathematics are explored in the context of a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory. The analogy between mathematical ``existence'' and physical ``existence'' is considered…
The notions of null-sets and nullity are present in all discourses of mathematics. They are based on the dual-pair of notions of "almost-every" and "almost none". A notion of nullity corresponds to a choice of subsets that one interprets as…
It is argued that every measurement is made in a certain scale. The scale in which present measuments are made is called present scale which gives present knowledge. Quantities at the limits to present measurement may be observables in…
A recently developed computational methodology for executing numerical calculations with infinities and infinitesimals is described in this paper. The developed approach has a pronounced applied character and is based on the principle `The…
By using ideas on complexity and randomness originally suggested by the mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in 1686, the modern theory of algorithmic information is able to show that there can never be a "theory of everything" for…
Magnitude is a numerical invariant of metric spaces introduced by Leinster, motivated by considerations from category theory. This paper extends the original definition for finite spaces to compact spaces, in an equivalent but more natural…
Magnitude is a numerical invariant of finite metric spaces, recently introduced by T. Leinster, which is analogous in precise senses to the cardinality of finite sets or the Euler characteristic of topological spaces. It has been extended…
The primary aim of Hilbert's proof theory was to establish the consistency of classical mathematics using finitary means only. Hilbert's strategy for doing this was to eliminate the infinite (in the form of unbounded quantifiers) from…
This introduction begins with a section on fundamental notions of mathematical logic, including propositional logic, predicate or first-order logic, completeness, compactness, the L\"owenheim-Skolem theorem, Craig interpolation, Beth's…
This text summarizes and expands the content of a general audience talk given in 2018 at the University of Mainz. Motivated by recent developments in dependent type theory and infinity category theory, it presents a history of ideas around…
The discovery of the infinite integer leads to a partition between finite and infinite numbers. Construction of an infinitesimal and infinitary number system, the Gossamer numbers. Du Bois-Reymond's much-greater-than relations and…