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Animatstoday at 8:29 PM0 repliesview on HN

There's an unpopular branch of mathematics which does not have infinities - finiteism.[1] The constructive version of finitism takes the position that there is no such thing as infinity, just arbitrarily large upper bounds. You can have theorems about arbitrarily large numbers, but you never get

    1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2
The benefit of finitism is that it escapes undecidability.

The big objection to finiteism is that it's a lot more work. Infinity swallows many special cases. Proofs get longer without infinity, and most of the special cases are uninteresting. That's not a problem for AIs.

Someone may start up an AI and make it grind through Hilbert's program for putting mathematics on a fully consistent foundation, starting from a finiteism base. This is a huge, unrewarding job. Great for machine work.

[1] https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Finitism