Starter mathematicians might think everything is math.
Senior mathematicians lose their sleep whenever they think about what our math is missing and they don't know what it is yet
Do we have ways of computing orders of infinity higher than ℵ₀?
Crap. Markdown isn't markdowning. Fixed with unicode.
Symbolically, sure, but then you're not dealing with infinities you're just representing them.
It's a meme it's playing fast and loose with things but the general gist is that mathematics, to this day, doesn't really care about Gödel/Church/Turing, incompleteness, the halting problem, whatever angle you want to look at it from. Formalists lost the war and they simply went on doing maths as if nothing had happened, as if a system could be simultaneously complete and consistent. There's people out there preaching to the unenlightened masses but it's an uphill battle.
Math went on because it doesn't matter. Nobody cares about incompleteness. If you can prove ZFC is inconsistent, do it and we'll all move to a new system and most of us wouldn't even notice (since nobody references the axioms outside of set theorists and logicians anyway). If you can prove it's incomplete, do it and nobody will care since the culprit will be an arcane theorem far outside the realm of non-logic fields of math.
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We have sorta the same problem with imaginary numbers, and I remember some programmable calculators can process complex numbers using symbolic representation (which happens to work similarly to Cartesian coordinates, so that's convenient)
But from what I remember any infinity bigger than counting numbers (say the set of real numbers) cannot be differentiated from each other, so we don't have established rules.
To be fair, I last tinkered with infinities in the aughts and then as a hobbyist. The Grand Hilbert Hotel can accomodate more compound infinities and still retain perfect utilization since the last time I visited.
Hello I am computer scientist and I can tell you that nobody of us would say something like that to the mathematician. Very very very many concepts of Computer Science are based on mathematics that require the concept of infinity to work like for example derivatives.
Your meme doesn't work in the age of floating point numbers.
Suggestion: "1.0/x for x>0→0.0 goes against infinity, so 1.0/0.0 is infinity."
The fact that that math just works everywhere is still one of the most convincing arguments that we live in a computer simulation.
This is just the other side of the "We're well adapted to this world so it must have been made for us" coin.
That gets into the invention vs. discovery dilemma, but mathematics is just a rule system with which we can make models of natural phenomena. Despite multiple efforts to try to resolve all paradoxes, we instead eventually developed a proof that no sufficiently complex system of mathematics can be made without paradox.
