Vicki
rosenzweig@acm.org
----------
From: owner-virus
To: virus
Subject: Re: virus: Real World?
Date: Tuesday, January 14, 1997 9:45AM
Eva wrote:
> Infinity may or may not be a number, depending on your
> definitions of a number. (I think most mathematicians are still
> using Frege's definition, by which a number is "the set of all
> sets equivalent to a given set." Using that definition, infinity
> is as valid a number as 3.) It's been a long time since I worked
> with any of this stuff, but there are at least two approaches to infinity.
> One is the cardinal number (size of a set) one, which gives us
> aleph-null, aleph-one, the Cantorian diagonal argument,
> and the like. The other is via ordinal numbers, where the first
> infinite ordinal--defined as the smallest number larger than
> all the finite integers--is called epsilon-zero. (That should be
> a Greek lower-case epsilon with the subscript 0, but I can't
> do that in ASCII.)
My knowledge of infinity based math is /very/ limited indeed. I wouldn't
profess to know anything about it, I'd just post what I /think/ I know
about it (and I'm usually wrong). The theory was in no way meant to be
taken quite so seriously, I was just intrigued by the validity of it.
I shall inform my med. school alcoholic that he's wrong :)
Drakir
(I've got fed up with this signature business)