Timeline for Why doesn't mathematics collapse even though humans quite often make mistakes in their proofs?
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| Feb 17, 2022 at 7:17 | comment | added | Jukka Kohonen | +1 for the obvious but important point that the "ad infinitum" is really "ad fininitum". The chains may be long but certainly they are finite, because the existing body of all mathematic writings is finite. Indeed, not only are the chains finite, but they will be relatively short -- relative to the size of all mathematics, that is. You could liken that body to a tree -- not perfectly balanced, but still very different from a linear chain that would go through every field of mathematics and everything would collapse from just one link of the chain breaking. | |
| S Aug 18, 2019 at 17:34 | history | answered | Noam D. Elkies | CC BY-SA 4.0 | |
| S Aug 18, 2019 at 17:34 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Noam D. Elkies |