What do you think of Infinity as a concept?

[ThinkTank]

I would love to see some information on this!

Here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_arithmetic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_induction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

 

[Gigaz]

Actually, I recall reading earlier this week that NASA's latest data suggests a universe that is infinite in space and time, but Google Fu has failed me miserably. Anyone got an opinion on this?

This is kind of misleading. What they actually want to say is that the global curvature of the universe is very small, perhaps zero. If you think of the universe as the surface of a 4-sphere or something similar, then you'd get a really big, perhaps infinite volume. However, Pacman has no curvature and his universe is certainly limited.

 

[nc-1701]

Here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_arithmetic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_induction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

That's hardly using it as a number... Of course infinity is relevant as a cardinality, that's what the first two pages of this thread were about.

 

[ThinkTank]

That's hardly using it as a number... Of course infinity is relevant as a cardinality, that's what the first two pages of this thread were about.

I think what Warpus was interested in was information on "rules for addition and multiplication of infinity", this is what the first link is about.

 

[warpus]

Here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_arithmetic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_induction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

I glanced through these and saw infinite sets, infinite sums, cardinalities of inifinite sets and so on. All perfectly fine concepts that don't require infinity to be a number, but it's possible I missed something since I'm in a bit of a rush.

I was looking for examples of infinity being used in an equation in a way other than you'd use it as a concept when dealing with infinite sums for example. Dealing with the cardinality of infinite sets is similar.

 

[onejayhawk]

I glanced through these and saw infinite sets, infinite sums, cardinalities of inifinite sets and so on. All perfectly fine concepts that don't require infinity to be a number, but it's possible I missed something since I'm in a bit of a rush.

I was looking for examples of infinity being used in an equation in a way other than you'd use it as a concept when dealing with infinite sums for example. Dealing with the cardinality of infinite sets is similar.

Here you go.

∞ + 8 = ∞

J