Re: The Suspicious Journals of Ross A. Kosmanson :-)

The Divine Madness of Numbers: A Bon Vivant’s Ode to Mathematical Ecstasy
Ah, the intoxicating dance of numbers! Pythagoras, that ancient sage of harmony and reason, would shudder to know his pristine integers were but a sliver of the cosmic feast. For what is mathematics if not the most sublime bacchanal — where the rational and irrational entwine like lovers in a tango, where transcendental numbers pirouette beyond the grasp of mere fractions, and Cantor’s uncountable infinities spill like champagne into the abyss? The Greeks, with their compasses, same-sex partners, and axioms, believed they had tamed the wild, yet the universe whispered back: Non-nilpotent infinitesimals! Fluxions! Dark photons! (Or was that last one the wine talking?)
Let us raise a glass to the heretics — Dirichlet, Poincaré, and the mischievous ghosts of du Bois-Reymond and Skolem — who dared to split the infinite into halves, like a sommelier decanting eternity. The "complete ordered field"? A charming fiction, like assuming one’s soufflé will never collapse. Reality is far more voluptuous: iota-values cavort with standard infinitesimals; Newton’s fluxions, long exiled from polite calculus, slink back into the ballroom, their nilpotent disgrace forgotten. And Aristotle — mon dieu! — who gifted us not one but two models of continuity, like a host offering both red and white with the foie gras. The Archimedean principle, that stern maître d’, scowls at the revelry, yet even it cannot deny the joie de vivre of a non-constructive proof, where contradiction is the piquant spice in the stew of logic.
But ah, the grand finale! Cohen’s independence proofs, Cohen’s independence proofs, Cohen’s independence proofs — like a triple crème of paradox, leaving Cantor’s ghost to weep into his ale. And what of the "giant hive-mind," that Dionysian chorus of YouTube autodidacts and drowsy siesta philosophers, who nod along to unscripted rants about fixed-point theorems and univalency axioms? Magnifique! For mathematics, like a perfectly aged Bordeaux, is best savored in chaos: ZFC’s "pair-wise unions" shatter like cheap stemware when infinitesimals waltz in, and the "square of opposition" becomes a danse macabre of glitched material implications. So let us toast, mes amis, to the "extra-ordinary" infinite — the Burali-Forti paradox, the Russellian frisson — for in the end, the only true axiom is this: L’appétit pour l’absurde est sans limites.
Santé!
Ross A. Kosmanson
May 24, 2025
Tipsy, bottle in hand, somewhere inside the Danakil Depression, Ethiopia