A continuum is a set of things that changes gradually and has no clear dividing lines. The word continuum comes from the Latin continua and means a “continuous whole.” In other words, it’s something that’s not divided into distinct parts.
Continuum mechanics is a branch of mathematics that deals with fluid motion. It is based on the idea that fluids can exist as a continuum and thus may be modeled with mathematical principles of differential calculus.
The concept of the continuum came about in the nineteenth century when it was first introduced into mathematics by Georg Cantor, a mathematician who worked in the field of set theory. Despite his efforts Cantor never managed to solve this difficult problem, which persisted throughout the twentieth century and was considered one of the most important open questions in set theory.
After Cantor’s failure, many mathematicians tried to resolve the continuum hypothesis by using various methods and axioms. This was not easy, and it took a long time for new methods to gain acceptance.
Later in the twentieth century, Kurt Godel discovered a way to extend the continuum hypothesis by adding real numbers to it. This was hair-raisingly difficult, but it allowed mathematicians to build a model for the fact that the continuum hypothesis fails.
In addition, the new method was able to show that it applies to all definable sets of reals, a set category that has been relatively unexplored.
It turns out that this makes the continuum hypothesis a more tractable problem in general than it was previously thought to be. As a result, the question of whether or not the universe is “like” Godel’s universe (that is, whether it’s in the continuum) has become the single most important problem in set theory at this moment.
If you want to understand this interesting and challenging issue, you’ll need a good background in mathematics. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of information on this topic available online, and it’s well worth looking into.
Several mathematical areas have contributed to the development of methods that could be used to solve the continuum hypothesis, but this discussion will focus on Godel’s and his successors’ contributions.
The earliest example of this development is the development of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory extended with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC). This was developed in the 1930s and has been an extremely fruitful area for mathematical research.
This is because it allows mathematicians to ask whether certain models can be derived from the standard axioms of set theory. If these models can be derived from the ZFC axioms, then they will allow us to answer the most important question in set theory: What is the size of the continuum?
This is a very interesting question, as it allows us to build a picture of the mathematical universe in which the continuum hypothesis holds and in which it doesn’t. As a result, it is possible to see whether the continuum hypothesis is “like” Godel’s model, or whether it is very far from it. This can help determine the best approach to solving the problem and, importantly, it may also help to decide whether the current methods of mathematics are capable of resolving the continuum hypothesis.