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BeetleB an hour ago

> What do "real" numbers buy you? That is, what do you get for the trouble of building your formalism around numbers that are not computable? Basically nothing.

It buys you the rigor of doing calculus, which buys you a lot of results that, while could be computed without calculus, would also be very difficult without it.

andrewla an hour ago | parent [-]

Agree to disagree!

Doing calculus with computable numbers is totally possible and you get all the continuity you need. You need to drop the Lebesgue formulation of the integeral and either use a Reimann integral or the gauge integral (Henstock–Kurzweil) if you need a well-behaved integral in the face of very poorly-behaved functions, but in physical reality these don't exist and in abstract mathematics they are rarely of interest and the gauge integral is as robust as Lebesgue without all the measure theory nonsense.

Intuitionalist analysis and calculus are very well established; the only thing you can't do with them is nonsense like showing that integrating over the characteristic function of the rationals is zero (who cares) or showing that you can break a three dimensional sphere up into three pieces are reassemble them after translations and rotations into a larger sphere (obviously not true).