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Comment by kragen

It's probably worth adding the context that Wildberger's agenda is to ground mathematics in integers and rational numbers, eliminating those pesky irrationals Euclid introduced, because reasoning about them invariably involves infinities or universal quantifiers, which everyone agrees are tricky and error-prone, even if they don't agree with Wildberger's radical variety of finitism. So he was delighted to find a kindred spirit millennia ago in the Plimpton 322 scribe and, presumably, the entire Babylonian mathematical tradition.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Proportions:_Rational_T...

parent kragen 1 year ago

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