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Infinity

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34 views2 pages

Infinity

Uploaded by

sanjidah.ahmed00
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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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In mathematics, infinity comes from a Latin word which means ‘without end’.

It is defined as an
unmeasurable and abstract concept (it is not a real number!) of something that is endless: it has
no bound, no limit, and no endpoint. It is famously denoted by the mathematical symbol called
the leminscate ‘∞’, which was first applied in mathematics by the English mathematician John
Wallis in 1655. One example of infinity can be seen in the sequence of the natural numbers
which never ends and is infinite. Infinity can also be described as the idea of ‘larger than any
natural number’ or even smaller than any number. In another way, infinity itself can convey the
concept that there is no largest number.

1.1 The Origin of infinity

The nature of infinity first came to light in Greek culture, but it was not exactly a mathematical
one, in fact it first originated as a philosophical subject from the works of the Ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle who had formulated the question ‘What exactly is actual infinity?’1, that
subsequently had led to many discussions among many other philosophers. There were two
key stages in the development of infinity. First, through the discovery of Bernard Bolzano, who
was a Bohemian Priest that was also interested in mathematics as well as philosophy. He had
introduced the existence of actual infinity in mathematics, soon published as his most renowned
book, that he had wrote in the year of his death, ‘Paradoxes of the Infinite’ explaining about the
theory of infinite sets and the strange paradoxes associated with infinity, such as how infinity
feels as though it should be a number, yet it does not act like one. Second, through the
appearance of Georg Cantor, who made it possible to incorporate infinity as a mathematical
object, which led to having an impact on almost every branch of mathematics.2 To the Greeks,
the approach of infinity had come to them from the physical world by three traditional
observations: (I) Time seems without end (II) Space and time can be unendingly subdivided (III)
Space is without bound.3 In order to continue, some Greek originations are needed for a true
understanding of the coming of infinity. Infinity had meant a lot of different things in Greek
culture such as a noun, adjective, and adverb. For philosophical reasons, the word infinity was
majority used as adjectives and nouns, whereas in mathematics, it was commonly used as an
adverb (where it could only exist) which had been used to quantify actions such as to add, to
subdivide, to continue on for almost ever.

1.2 Bolzano’s discoveries

When measuring actual infinity try to compare two infinity sets, you have to choose from two
principles, which are mutually exclusive:

1. The ‘part-whole’ principle: The whole is greater than its parts.

1 K. Trlifajova, Bolzano’s Infinite Quantities, (2017), p.2


2 H. Eves, ‘An Introduction to the History of
Mathematics’, (1990)
3 https://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/masters/infinity/infinity.pdf
2. The ‘one-to-one correspondence’ principle: Two sets of numbers have the same size
only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them. 4

The foundation of Bolzano’s theorem of infinity was built on the first principle and insisted on
the whole being greater than its part whereas Gregor Cantor based his theory on the second
principle. Bernard Bolzano was a bohemian philosopher and physician but had soon left
metaphysics behind, and placed himself in the mathematical world. Bolzano’s journey of infinity
created a possibility of welcoming the concept of infinity as a mathematical object which was
illustrated in his book ‘The paradoxes of Infinity’. These paradoxes that he had found present in
his time had inspired him to investigate infinity closer and write about it. Due to this, Bolzano
had come to the conclusion that these paradoxes were in fact created by the absence of an
operational domain for infinity and so he had tried to create a new theory in order to solve this.
This led to the set theory of infinity, which Bolzano had considered sets to be: ‘as an
embodiment of the idea or concept which we conceive when we regard the arrangement of its
parts as a matter of indifference’.5

He had remarked: "the set of all absolute truths is an infinite set’.6

Bolzano had defended the concept of an infinite set and his work gave rise to the existence of a
set which had transformed infinity into an object within an operational domain and with this new
interpretation it was possible for infinity to be integrated into mathematics.

4 K. Trlifajova, Bolzano’s Infinite Quantities, (2017), p.2


5 https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Beginnings_of_set_theory/

6 B. Bolzano, ‘The paradoxes of infinity’ (1851) p.90

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