The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Nonstandard Analysis - a podcast by MCMP Team

Sam Sanders (MCMP/LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (26 November, 2015) titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Nonstandard Analysis". Abstract: There is a persistent belief, propagated by such luminaries as Errett Bishop and Alain Connes, that infinitesimals (in the sense of Robinson’s Nonstandard Analysis (NSA) ) somehow are fundamentally non-constructive and that NSA is devoid of numerical meaning, as Bishop was wont to say. In this talk, we disprove the Bishop-Connes claim regarding NSA. To this end, we show that theorems of NSA are equivalent to their associated “highly constructive" theorems from numerical analysis (not involving NSA). We shall focus on potential applications of these results in philosophy and computer science, especially concerning vagueness and ontology.

Further episodes of MCMP

Further podcasts by MCMP Team

Website of MCMP Team