I shall be giving a keynote lecture for the CFORS Grad Conference at the University of Oslo, 19-20 June 2024.
Abstract. I shall describe a simple historical thought experiment showing how our attitude toward the continuum hypothesis could easily have been very different than it is. If our mathematical history had been just a little different, I claim, if certain mathematical discoveries had been made in a slightly different order, then we would naturally view the continuum hypothesis as a fundamental axiom of set theory, one furthermore necessary for mathematics and indeed, indispensable for calculus.
The paper is now available at How the continuum hypothesis could have been a fundamental axiom.