Single Review on past events

Carolin Antos-Kuby is a Research Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Philosophy.

When one talks about size, one usually asks questions like “How big or small is a certain thing?”. Answers to this most often include things like numbers, counting, relations or measurements. These terms are made exact in mathematics and so in this second instalment of the Jour Fixe mini-series about "Size" we had a look at how mathematics defines and works with size. In particular we focused on how mathematics was able to deal with sizes that are difficult to approach by our everyday intuition about size: the realm of the infinite. Here even simple mathematical operations like multiplication follow rules that have to be adopted to the context of infinity and don’t conform with our finite understanding of mathematics. At the turn of the century this problem sparked the so-called "foundational crisis of mathematics" that dominated the mathematical and philosophical discussion throughout the first part of the 20th century.

This Jour Fixe presentation is part of the special Jour fixe series "Size", organised by Carolin Antos-Kuby (Research Fellow/Dept. of Philosophy), Janina Beiser-McGrath (Postdoctoral Fellow/Dept. of Politics and Public Administration) and Klaus Boldt (Research Fellow/Dept. of Chemistry).