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How Large Is Infinity?: General Questions

- Infinity is not a number, but rather a concept that represents something without end or limits. - Mathematicians distinguish between potential infinity, which refers to endless processes like counting, and actual infinity, which involves completed infinite sets. - Actual infinity leads to counterintuitive results, such as a set having the same number of elements as one of its proper subsets, or a set having the same number of elements as the Cartesian product of itself with itself.

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75 views3 pages

How Large Is Infinity?: General Questions

- Infinity is not a number, but rather a concept that represents something without end or limits. - Mathematicians distinguish between potential infinity, which refers to endless processes like counting, and actual infinity, which involves completed infinite sets. - Actual infinity leads to counterintuitive results, such as a set having the same number of elements as one of its proper subsets, or a set having the same number of elements as the Cartesian product of itself with itself.

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maleckisale
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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General Questions

last expression, you need to divide a by a sequence bn with limit 0. But when
bn goes to zero,

a
bn

could go to +, if bn > 0, or to , if bn < 0, or not exist

at all if bn alternates. Therefore, the expression

a
0

must remain undefined.

Mathematicians call expressions like this indeterminate forms. In some


cases, they can be thought of as having a certain value, while in other cases,
as having another value or none at all.

11. HOW LARGE IS INFINITY?


The first real opportunity where even young children can experience a
sense of wonder in a mathematical context is when they make the basic
observation that counting never ends. Typically, children are fascinated by
very large numbers, and so was the 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, who became
famous for inventing the name googol for the number 10100 in 1920. Later
on, his uncle, the mathematician Edward Kasner (18781955), wrote about
this in a book Mathematics and the Imagination, and still later, other imaginative young fellows named their company Google after the number googol
to indicate the large amount of data handled by Internet search engines.
Although the number googol is already unimaginably large, we can easily think of even larger numbers, for example, googol + 1 or 10googol (which
has been called googolplex), or even the factorial of googol, or googolgoogol.
The process of generating larger numbers from any given number obviously
has no end. Therefore, the set of integers certainly cannot be finite. If it were,
then there would be a largest number, which is impossible, because for any
given number we can immediately find a bigger one just by adding 1.
Therefore, the sequence of natural numbers has no end and we say that it
goes to infinity, because anything that has no end or grows without limit is
referred to as infinite. Thus, infinity is not a number in the usual senseit is
rather an idea or concept. And thinking about infinity is one of the most
intriguing aspects of mathematics.
Already in Greek philosophy, Aristotle (384 BC322 BC) distinguished
between potential infinity and actual infinity. The process of generating
larger and larger integers is an example leading to potential infinity. Potential
infinity refers to an endless procedure, like counting, that can be continued
indefinitely. No matter how far you go, you can still go further. This is the
type of infinity encountered in calculus, when one deals with limits of
sequences. We say that a sequence ( n ) goes to infinity, which we write
symbolically as lim n n = , if the sequence grows without bounds. The
precise definition is the following: Whenever we assume a bound M, no matter how large, we can always find an index n0 so that starting with this index,

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100 Commonly Asked Questions in Math Class

all the remaining an are bigger than M. It is important to notice that this
definition only mentions finite numbers M and n0 and refers to a procedure
that can be repeated in the same way when M is made larger and larger. This
is characteristic of potential infinityit always refers to finite quantities,
which, however, may be arbitrarily large.
In contrast, actual infinity (or completed infinity) refers to mathematical
situations where infinity is actually achieved. This notion has been rejected
by Aristotle and other mathematicians until modern times, where, for example, Carl Friedrich Gauss (17771855) vehemently protested against the
usage of infinity in the sense of a completed quantity. But when Georg
Cantor (18451918) invented set theory, he also felt the need to deal with
actual infinities. In set theory, actual infinity is just the number of elements
(the cardinality) of infinite sets, and an infinite set can simply be defined as
one that is not finite. For example, the set of all natural numbers is considered as a single, well-defined mathematical object that is given once and for
all and does not change any more. It is an infinite set as has been shown
before. Here infinity has been reached, as it refers to a property of a completely well-defined set. Cantor introduced the symbol 0 (aleph-null) to
describe the (infinite) cardinality of the set of all natural numbers, and he
was even able to distinguish among different types of infinity. In this context,
the cardinality 0 of the integers is also called countable infinity.
Actual infinity may lead to statements that appear paradoxical at first
sight. Two sets are said to have the same cardinality when there exists a oneto-one mapping (a bijection) between them. For infinite sets, this notion
leads to some quite amazing and unexpected results: An infinite set A will
have a proper subset B that has the same cardinality as the set A. For example, the set of square integers {0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25,...} has the same cardinality as the set = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,...} of all nonnegative integers (because
there is a one-to-one correspondence between nonnegative integers and their
squares, n n 2 ). Indeed, Cantor (and before him Dedekind) used this property to give an alternative definition of infinite sets: An infinite set is one that
has the same cardinality as one of its proper subsets.
Another strange result is that an infinite set A has the same cardinality as
the Cartesian product A A = {(x, y ) | x, y A} . An example of a one-to-one
mapping between and is (n, m) 2n (2m + 1) , because every
natural number can be written in a unique way as a product of a power of
two and an odd number. Similarly, the one-dimensional line contains the
same number of elements as the two-dimensional plane 2 = . Of
course, this could not happen with a finite set.
The counterintuitive aspects of (countable) infinite sets are paraphrased
in the story of Hilberts hotel: In a world inhabited by infinitely many people,
in one of its infinitely many cities there is a hotel called Hilberts Grand

General Questions

Hotel after the famous mathematician David Hilbert (18621943). Hilberts


Grand Hotel has infinitely many rooms (consecutively numbered as 1, 2,
3,...). All rooms are occupied when a new guest arrives. The manager now
has a simple idea that enables him to accommodate the new guest in the
hotel. He moves the guest occupying room 1 to room 2, the guest occupying
room 2 to room 3, and so on. This will leave room 1 empty for the newcomer.
(Do not try to imagine the noise in the lobby, when infinitely many guests
complain that they have to change room because of a single newcomer.)
Actually, if the manager had told everybody to move from the room with
number n to the room with number 2n, this would even have emptied infinitely many rooms (all those with odd room numbers) and still no one would
be without accommodation.
It should be noted that actual infinity is still a mathematical concept and
the word actual does not imply that anything infinite exists in the real world.
Although infinity is used as a mathematical concept in theoretical physics,
physicists generally believe that nothing in the physical world can be infinite. For example, the number of protons in the whole universe is estimated
at about 1080, which is much less than a googol. On philosophical grounds,
one might even argue that enormously big numbers do not exist at all except
as a mathematical idea. Except for those special numbers for which we have
an explicit algorithm or notation (like, for example, 10googol), there is no way
to write an arbitrary number that has googol decimal digits. The whole universe would not provide sufficient space, time, and material to do that, not
even if we place a digit on every single elementary particle of all the galaxies
in the universe. One could not represent this number in any way or compare
it with others or do any computation with it. In short, there is nothing in reality that corresponds to such a number. And in mathematics, even these large
numbers are infinitely tiny against infinity.

12. IS THERE ANYTHING LARGER THAN INFINITY?


The mathematical concept of infinity is tricky, but interesting. In calculus,
the symbol is defined as something that is bigger than any real number,
hence we have a < for all real numbers a. In that sense, no number is larger
than infinity. But wait, mathematics is full of surprises!
In number theory, we encounter the concept of infinity as the number of
elements, or cardinality, of an infinite set. An example of an infinite set is the
set of all natural numbers, = {1, 2, 3, ...}, whose cardinality is denoted by
0 (pronounced aleph-null, where aleph is the first letter in the Hebrew
alphabet). In fact, most of the sets that are of interest in mathematics are infinite:
the set of rational numbers, the set of real numbers, the set of points in a plane,
and so on.

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