TobyBartels comments on The Truth About Mathematical Ability - LessWrong

61 Post author: JonahSinick 12 February 2015 01:29AM

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Comment author: TobyBartels 16 February 2015 05:07:31AM 1 point [-]

Unless you take Edward Nelson's approach.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2015 11:23:23AM 1 point [-]

Sorry, I haven't heard of him. Could you explain and/or link?

Comment author: TobyBartels 17 February 2015 02:38:32AM *  3 points [-]

He worked on both ultrafinitism and nonstandard analysis, bringing new approaches to both. He was discussed around here a couple of years ago for his claim to have proved the existence of a contradiction in Peano Arithmetic, but Terry Tao found the flaw. Unfortunately, he died last year.

In his nonstandard days, he wrote Radically Elementary Probability Theory. This is not simply redoing standard continuous probability theory with nonstandard analysis, but doing discrete probability theory with nonstandard integers. All of the useful things appear, but it all looks very different. Princeton still hosts the PDF: https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/rept.pdf

ETA: While ultrafinitism and nonstandard analysis seem almost complete opposites as far as constructivism goes, his approaches to them are actually quite similar to one another.