RE: Mathematicians who are finitists.
July 3, 2019 at 2:52 am
(This post was last modified: July 3, 2019 at 2:55 am by A Toy Windmill.)
(July 2, 2019 at 11:29 pm)Jehanne Wrote:I wrote:(July 2, 2019 at 12:19 pm)A Toy Windmill Wrote: And intuitionistic mathematics doesn't have issue with Turing machines either. They aren't particularly "Cantorian."
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.
Then "intuitionistic mathematics" is not finitism.
Quote: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 finiteI am not saying that intuitionistic mathematics is finitism (no need for quotes: these are the proper terms). Finitism does not permit universal quantification over infinite domains in anything other than
a schematic form. Intuitionistic mathematics does. Both, however, assume that mathematical constructions are finite, and I'm not sure what anxiety finitism alleviates that intuitionism does not.