A small group of researchers hopes to banish infinity completely.
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Most mathematicians take the notion of infinity for granted — it’s deeply rooted in modern math’s most fundamental assumptions. But a small group of researchers hopes to banish infinity completely. Explore the third chapter in the series.
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What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
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Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond.
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Why Math’s Final Axiom Proved So Controversial
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Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily.
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How Gödel’s Incompleteness Proof Works
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His two theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences.
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How Infinity Leads to One of Math’s Strangest Paradoxes
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One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.
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Do We Really Need Infinity?
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Hosted By SAMIR PATEL with
GREGORY BARBER
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All things come to an end. Even numbers. At least, that’s what some mathematicians believe. To them, the notion of infinity creates more problems than it solves.
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