Encyclopedia > Ultraintuitionism

  Article Content

Ultraintuitionism

In the philosophy of mathematics, ultraintuitionism is an extreme version of intuitionism.

Ultraintuitionists deny the existence of the infinite set N of natural numbers, on the grounds that it can never be completed. In addition, ultraintuitionists are concerned with our own physical restrictions in constructing mathematical objects. Thus some ultraintuitionists will deny the existence of, for example, the floor of the first Skewes' number, which is a huge number defined using the exponential function as exp(exp(exp(79))), or

<math>e^{e^{e^{79}}}.</math>
The reason is that nobody has yet calculated what natural number is the floor of this real number, and it may not even be physically possible to do so.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Wheatley Heights, New York

... the town the population is spread out with 30.3% under the age of 18, 8.1% from 18 to 24, 29.9% from 25 to 44, 23.8% from 45 to 64, and 7.9% who are 65 years of age or ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 33.3 ms