(June 30, 2019 at 1:30 pm)LastPoet Wrote:(June 30, 2019 at 12:03 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Not many mathematicians are finitists; in fact, after my OP, I updated the Wikipedia article:
Wikipedia -- Finitism
to reflect that Reuben Goodstein, a finitist mathematician, had died in the 1980s.
While such work is not to be ignored, a finitist mathematician is similar to a intuitionist logician, where reductio is not allowed. Not my school of thought.
Everyone agrees (or, should agree) that transfinite arithmetic is a productive area of study, in that there are numerous papers that have been published on the subject, along with textbooks. You can take classes on the topic. I think that finitists are like Biblical creationists, in that they deny the obvious.