When I tell many people that I do my research in infinite combinatorial games, they immediately assume that my research is more impressive[0] than my officemate

When I tell many people that I do my research in infinite combinatorial games, they immediately assume that my research is more impressive[0] than my officemate's research dealing with finite combinatorics. I always move quickly to correct them: dealing with infinity often has the effect of making mathematics easier, and unfairly "trivializes" distinctly difficult problems. After all, in my work, 2^100 is "just finite", even though that many milliseconds would compose over 40 quintillion years. To your point, I don't know the answer of whether the universe is finitely describable or not. But I certainly know it's easier to abstract many small aspects of the universe with an approximation by an "infinite model" than to deal with the ridiculously large finite numbers involved. [0] if more useless