Ultrafinitism

Ultrafinitism is the idea that some mathematical objects and concepts are too big to exist. Just like you can't count to infinity because it keeps going on forever, some mathematicians believe that certain mathematical concepts are too big to even imagine.

Imagine you have a box of chocolates and you want to share them equally between three friends. You can easily divide them into three groups of equal size. But what if you have a box of chocolates so big that you could never count how many pieces there are in it? This is the idea of ultrafinitism – there is a limit to how big things can be before we can't even make sense of them.

Ultrafinitists believe that we should only work with mathematical objects that can be described and manipulated directly, without having to imagine infinitely large sets of objects. This means that some theories and concepts in mathematics, like the infinite set of numbers, may not be real because they're too big to exist in the real world.

In short, ultrafinitism is a way of approaching mathematics that avoids dealing with really big things that we can't even begin to imagine. It reminds us that there are limits to what we can know and understand, even in the world of math!