Is the pope a mathematician? Yes, actually – and his training may help him grapple with the infinite

By Balthasar Grabmayr, Junior Professor of Philosophy, University of Tübingen

Humans are finite creatures. Our brains have a finite number of neurons and we interact with a finite number of people during our finite lifetime. Yet humans have the remarkable ability to conceive of the infinite.

This ability underlies Euclid’s proof that there are infinite prime numbers as well as the belief of billions that their gods are infinite beings, free of mortal constraints.

These ideas will be well known to Pope Leo XIV since before his life in the church, he trained as a…

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