April 14, 2007

Infinity: You Can’t Get There From Here

Infinity is not a number; it is a word that clearly defies having as starting point but no limited ending. In infinity comes from a Latin word infinitas meaning “unbound”. When you think about infinity what usually comes into mind is the idea of no ending. Infinity is bigger than the biggest thing you could ever think of. When counting numbers we usually start with one and count till a hundred maybe, but a hundred is not the last number, it does not end there, the number continues on and on. Infinity is usually thought of as the largest number possible or the furthest possible distance. In Google infinity is defined as "Infinity is free from any possible limitation"; meaning that it is not even close to an ending infinity has no limitation, no limited number. Whatever number we can think of there is always a larger one. Infinity in mathematics is not finite.

Why count starting from one why not start with a negative number and count backwards stopping with a negative a hundred? Even with a negative, infinity exists, you can count backwards and never come to an end just like when you are counting forward. It is said that a sequence of numbers, a1, a2, a3…aN, is said to approach infinity when the number becomes too large.

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 As Euclid demonstrated, in a line there are many points; in a sense referring to a collection of objects that does not contain a finite number of objects. A German mathematician named George Cantor showed that there are different

Gibson, Lourdes page 2

orders of infinity, the infinity of points on a line being  of a greater order than of prime numbers (positive integer that has exactly two positive factors, one and itself). In geometry one might define a point of infinity as the point of and intersection of two parallel lines. Cantor defined two kinds of infinite ...

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