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Infinity: should we believe in it?

If it is indeed to Georg Cantor that we owe, at the end of the 19th century, having definitively made infinity a branch of mathematics rather than of theology or philosophy, the "paradise" thus offered was the culmination of two millennia of hesitations, back-and-forths and controversies against a backdrop of paradoxes. Zeno had presented the lurking contradictions. Aristotle had set up a reasonable compromise. Reflections were refined on the infinitely small until giving birth to differential calculus… Today, infinity has so triumphed that it is now from it that the finite is defined, in an extraordinary reversal that we owe to Bolzano and Dedekind.

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