RE: Mathematicians who are finitists.
July 2, 2019 at 12:19 pm
(This post was last modified: July 2, 2019 at 12:21 pm by A Toy Windmill.)
(July 2, 2019 at 11:36 am)Jehanne Wrote:And intuitionistic mathematics doesn't have issue with Turing machines either. They aren't particularly "Cantorian."(July 2, 2019 at 9:12 am)A Toy Windmill Wrote: It's not clear to me what anxieties are soothed by finitism that are not adequately soothed by intuitionism, which agrees that mathematical constructions are finite and which enjoys far more active research. It also has practical advantages to computer scientists.
CS does not have any issues with Cantorian mathematics, such as infinite Turning machines.
The most notable attraction of intuitionism, however, is in type theory, where type systems display a glaring analogy with logic that is celebrated as the Curry-Howard Correspondence. This has been upgraded to The Holy Trinity with the ever growing popularity of category theory in CS. The analogy is nearly always specifically with an intuitionistic logic, being also a logic that is automatically focused on computable functions, which CS people have a bias towards.