Turn off ZeroDivisionError?

Paul Rubin http
Fri Feb 15 21:10:40 EST 2008


Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> writes:
> > But the IEEE standard only supports one of them, aleph(0).
> > Technically two: plus and minus aleph(0).
> 
> Not sure that alephs have anything to do with it.

They really do not.  The extended real line can be modelled in set
theory, but the "infinity" in it is not a cardinal as we would
normally treat them in set theory.  Almost all of what we usually call
real analysis can be done in fairly weak subsystems of second order
arithmetic, which is a countable theory.  There is a fairly interesting
rant arguing basically that set theory itself is bogus (not in the
sense of being wrong, but in the sense of being unnecessary for 
most mathematics):

  http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/psa1992.pdf



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