2 ms·
That’s opening a can of worms. Fundamentally, the real number system is larger and weirder than “we” mostly think it is (and hence its extensions to higher dim
by ska 2y ago
That’s opening a can of worms. Fundamentally, the real number system is larger and weirder than “we” mostly think it is (and hence its extensions to higher dimensions). If you start trying to remove objects it easily becomes a game of whack-a-mole; some of your nice, intuitive definitions elsewhere become muddy. Colin alludes to this in the article (e.g. should all sets be measureable, etc.). If there were easy and satisfying fixes for this, it would have been sorted out long ago!
This isn’t just aesthetic. Although probability is one of the oldest areas of mathematical thought, dating back millennia, it took measure theory to put it on a really solid basis, several decades ago. These approaches are powerful and useful, but some of the corners are certainly counterintuitive.