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You can certainly use real numbers. You just have to pick the finite subset of them that you need for a given problem and an appropriate encoding for them.
by Retra 8y ago
You can certainly use real numbers. You just have to pick the finite subset of them that you need for a given problem and an appropriate encoding for them.
- throwawaymath 8y agoThat's not what they mean by "use real numbers." If you're using a finite subset of the reals, you're not using the reals. We can only approximate real numbers in a finite representation.
- Retra 8y agoThat's all anybody has ever done. You may as well be claiming that the reals don't exist because no mathematician has conceptualized one non-symbolically and non-approximately. When you do calculus on the reals, you only ever approximate or encode a finite (really, countable) subset of them.