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0fe6ae No.298

What do you guys think about type or category theory as a basis for the mathematical edifice rather than set theory?

Personally I don't think there is any point to it, but I would love to hear some arguments to the contrary.

What is the more practical foundation for mathematics?

fdd35d No.305

>>298

It feels more natural.

In ZFC, everything is a set. But what is 3 unified with pi? It makes no sense. I have never seen any argument in higher mathematics that leveraged something like this.

If we can put it all on a clean foundation, I'm all for it.

As for practicality, the higher levels of abstraction should be more or less independent of the foundations, so neither will be more practical in that sense.


0fe6ae No.306

>>305

Well, I don't see a problem with 3 unified with pi being a set. Pi, as a real number, is a Cauchy sequence of rational numbers, which is an countably infinite collection of ordered pairs. To me it is clear that is a set. 3 is just the collection of 0,1,2, which are all sets by the Von Neuman construction of the numbers.

3 union pi is an infinite set, and a set nonetheless. However pi is not an ordinal, (I'm not sure if it is ordinal definable or not, I think so though), so we don't have that 3 union pi is pi, as 3 union 4 would be 4.

I agree that the topos in question shouldn't affect the more abstracted results. But it seems like viewing something from a different perspective is a trend in mathematics that leads to advances.


ef0b61 No.324

>>306

A small note about your representation of 3 as a set: It's not incorrect, since in fact you can give it any representation you want in a number system, but it's not the same representation as the one you gave for pi.

The number 3 as an integer is actually different than 3 as a real number, but there is a natural embedding of Z into R which maps n to the sequence (n, n, n, ...), which as you say it, is the set of ordered pairs {(1, n), (2, n), (3, n), ...}.

Another small detail is that this representation is not unique, so you can fix this by defining the real number x to be the set of all Cauchy sequences converging to x. In algebra, this would be the coset denoted x + N, where N is the set of all Cauchy sequences converging to 0, with addition being element-wise addition and multiplication of the Cauchy sequences. In this sense, the union of x + N and y + N is sorta like a residue class, and although it doesn't represent a real number, I'm sure there are some pretty cool uses of it.

To answer OP's question, I'm not well-versed in category or type theory, but I think functions are a MUCH more natural first-class citizen for a more practical foundation of mathematical logic than sets. Functions have just as little structure as sets do, and they arise from nature more easily I think. This is where type theory shines, where you can disprove the existence of an object by considering the set S of all such objects and proving the existence of a function S -> {}. If S maps into the empty set, then of course S is empty, and your mathematical object doesn't exist. But whether type theory actually makes logic easier is something I'm unsure of.


0fe6ae No.344

>>324

Thanks for that example there at the end, really illustrates some of the power there.

However, I'm confused by your statement that functions are more fundamental first class citizens, a function requires a domain and codomain. How are these things not sets? I'm familiar with people defining constants as functions on the empty set, but even the most restricted idea of a function requires some notion of a set.




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