A conference earlier this year had the effect that some main stream media started to report about it. I saw it here in an Austrian journal. But the article does not report on any new discoveries. The 2025 Ultrafinitism Conference was also a cover story for NewScientist Magazine. I thought to say something about this, even so I covered it in a youtube talk from 2021 and a an entry here on this website from 9/11/2021. I had then also mentioned Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Ed Nelson and Doron Zeilberger as well of course Kronecker. See also the finitist bunker and ultra-finite calculus with the talk
I myself first learned about strict finitism from Erwin Engeler, a student of Paul Bernays and Ernst Specker. Engeler would probably get labeled today not only as a logician but also as a computer scientist. Here is the Abschiedsvorlesung ETH lecture of Engeler in 1996. Since Specker is a student of Hopf and Eckmann, also Engeler belongs to the large family of faculty at ETH that has been shaped by Heinz Hopf. I was lucky to learn set theoretical topology from Engeler as well as a computer science course mathematical software. I have not changed my view about strict finitism since then. For me it is a computer science approach to mathematics. You only allow to do things which are also feasible and can be constructed. I myself can befriend myself with that when implementing things. And indeed, we constantly have to make size choices when doing experiments. Of course I would love to make computations with graphs with millions of nodes but it is just not practical. Finitism of course was big topic in Speckers mind and it appeared often in his courses (I had Specker for two semesters linear algebra and model theory) as well as Seminars.
To the right is a screenshot from youtube interview with Esenin-Volpin.
