Dear community,
While I am still waiting for responses by several contestants including Cristinel Stoica, I highly appreciate the private response to my essay I got from David Joyce. He is a professor of mathematics, an expert in history of mathematics. I will ask him again for his permission to put his reply on this public location.
In the meantime I would like to try and clarify to him and perhaps to you all which two old notion I would like to suggest for reinstating more precisely:
i) Euclid's notion of number as related to the ideal notion of unity
ii) a continuum every part of which has parts as still stated by Peirce.
Both old notions were accepted until the 19th century. While the notion unity is not identical with any object of consideration like length, area, a countable item, etc., it can nonetheless be attributed to it, and it shares its extension.
When the notion of number relates to the notion of unity, and a true continuum cannot be composed of any finite amount of extension-less points, which do not have parts, then there are no singular numbers. Brouwer's intuitionism comes close to it.
Accordingly, we should not declare Aristotle, Galilei, and Leibniz outdated and Peirce just an often drunk stupid American. Even if Peirce was an outsider, I consider him more intelligent than the whole folks including Dedekind, Cantor, Frege, ...
Let's judge the foundational consequences for physics. Shouldn't we consider numbers and continuum quasi orthogonal to each other?
Eckard