Key words: the continuum, structuralism, conceptual structuralism, basic structural conceptions, Euclidean geometry, Hilbertian geometry, the real number system, settheoretical conceptions, phenomenological conceptions, foundational conceptions, physical conceptions.

1. One theory or many? In 2004 a very interesting and readable article by Lenore Blum, entitled “Computing over the reals: Where Turing meets Newton,” appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. It explained a basic model of computation over the reals due to Blum, Michael Shub and Steve Smale (1989), subsequently exposited at length in their influential book, Complexity and Real Computation (1997), coauthored with Felipe Cucker. The ‘Turing’ in the title of Blum’s article refers of course (...) to Alan Turing, famous for his explication of the notion of mechanical computation on discrete data such as the integers. The ‘Newton’ there has to do to with the well known numerical method due to Isaac Newton for approximating the zeros of continuous functions under suitable conditions that is taken to be a paradigm of scientific computing. Finally, the meaning of “Turing meets Newton” in the title of Blum’s article has another, more particular aspect: in connection with the problem of controlling errors in the numerical solution of linear equations and inversion of matrices,Turing (1948) defined a notion of condition for the relation of changes in the output of a computation due to small changes in the input that is analogous to Newton’s definition of the derivative. The thrust of Blum’s 2004 article was that the BSS model of computation on the reals is the appropriate foundation for scientific computing in general. By way of response, two years later another very interesting and equally readable article appeared in the Notices, this time by Mark Braverman and Stephen Cook (2006) entitled “Computing over the reals: Foundations for scientific computing,” in which the authors argued that the requisite foundation is provided by a quite different “bit computation” model, that is in fact prima facie incompatible with the BSS model. The bit computation model goes back to ideas due to Stefan Banach and Stanislaw Mazur in the latter part of the 1930s, but the first publication was not made until Mazur (1963).. (shrink)