Infinity: New Research Frontiers was developed to explore new research domains involving concepts of infinity in a technically rigorous, as well as interdisciplinary, context. It is the culmination of a creative research initiative that began with the international conference “New Frontiers in Research on Infinity,” held August 18 to 20, 2006, in San Marino. The conference was co-organized by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), Berkeley, California, and the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and it was funded by a generous grant to CTNS from JTF with assistance from Euresis, Milan, and the Republic of San Marino. The invitation-only conference, whose theme was the concept and meaning of infinity in the multifaceted contexts of mathematics, physics, cosmology, philosophy, and theology, laid the intellectual groundwork for this volume.

Esteemed researchers in these diverse fields were invited to contribute to this book with the purpose of pursuing one of the “biggest questions” facing humankind: the notion of infinity. As the great German mathematician David Hilbert stated, as quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of this volume, “No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man.” Infinity has usually been regarded as a “limiting concept,” that is, a concept to which we arrive by extrapolating from what we know and what is limited and finite. However, some thinkers, following the example of Descartes, claim that infinity is a “primordial concept” and that all other concepts are derived from it.