I saw this Reddit post today saying "My son's third-grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by 0 is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. ...
Don’t think of infinity as a value. It’s more of a concept to explain numerical behavior. What you described would be like running north at 5 mph south. The limit diverge do it does not exist.
But it is a value. Just one we tend to avoid by claiming it doesn’t exist or is impossible…
Our minds just have a hard time imagining it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Our minds? Infinity isn’t something we don’t understand - we invented the concept of infinity. The mathematics community agreed on its definition, which includes the fact that infinity is not a real number, it literally does not exist. Show me infinity, I’ll give you infinity+1.
You deciding that infinity means something else is not a math problem but a language problem, so if being right about this is that important to you, start a petition or something
First sentence from Wikipedia: “Infinity is something which is boundless, endless, or larger than any natural number.”
In other terms give me a natural number n, I’ll show you a larger number, n+1, and I’ll do it again and again. That’s the definition of infinity. There’s always a bigger number.
Right! hence why you can only approach it with the limit notation, never operate on it directly. Please, take a calculus class. You might even learn this on day 1
Don’t think of infinity as a value. It’s more of a concept to explain numerical behavior. What you described would be like running north at 5 mph south. The limit diverge do it does not exist.
But it is a value. Just one we tend to avoid by claiming it doesn’t exist or is impossible… Our minds just have a hard time imagining it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Our minds? Infinity isn’t something we don’t understand - we invented the concept of infinity. The mathematics community agreed on its definition, which includes the fact that infinity is not a real number, it literally does not exist. Show me infinity, I’ll give you infinity+1.
You deciding that infinity means something else is not a math problem but a language problem, so if being right about this is that important to you, start a petition or something
So you believe the universe just ends somewhere with nothing behind it?
What’s that got to do with anything? Infinity is just shorthand for “ever-increasing number”.
Uhm… No it’s not… 🤨
First sentence from Wikipedia: “Infinity is something which is boundless, endless, or larger than any natural number.”
In other terms give me a natural number n, I’ll show you a larger number, n+1, and I’ll do it again and again. That’s the definition of infinity. There’s always a bigger number.
Boundless and endless (and the fact it’s larger than any number) doesn’t mean it’s ever-growing. It already is.
Right! hence why you can only approach it with the limit notation, never operate on it directly. Please, take a calculus class. You might even learn this on day 1