The following is an excerpt from Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng Mathematics can be thought of as many things: a language, a tool, a game. It might ...
The notion of infinity is fundamentally beyond the human ability to comprehend, but that hasn’t stopped mathematicians from trying. So just what is infinity, and why is there more than one of them?
Albert Einstein famously said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.” The notion of infinity has been pondered by the greatest minds over the ...
This video explores the bizarre mathematics that show how infinity is far stranger than a number. Infinity sounds simple. It just means really, really big, right? But once you start performing ...
IF YOU were forced to learn long division at school, you might have had cause to curse whoever invented arithmetic. A wearisome whirl of divisors and dividends, of bringing the next digit down and ...
This is what happens when you mess with infinity. You might think that if you simply started adding the natural numbers, 1 plus 2 plus 3 and so on all the way to infinity, you would get a pretty big ...
Last week, my first grader came home with thoughts about math (I love it when she does that!) She said that, since one hundred plus ten was “one hundred and ten”, that, therefore, infinity plus ten ...
With infinity, we made a monster. Our minds demand that it should exist – only to rapidly melt at the consequences of a concept that is, by definition, too big for our brains. The pleasure and the ...
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