On January 07 2011 22:12 Taf the Ghost wrote:On January 07 2011 22:04 Silidons wrote:On January 07 2011 21:50 Jacobs Ladder wrote:On January 07 2011 21:47 kuroshiro wrote:On January 07 2011 21:39 timmyfred wrote:On January 07 2011 21:38 shaunnn wrote:
Doing a maths degree and ive literally never heard of greater infinity rofl, pretty sure thats complete bs
I have a math degree, and have also never heard of it. Why? Because the concept of infinity literally doesn't allow for anything greater than it.
Uh... some infinities are larger than others dude. I'm no maths grad so sorry for the bad example but: e.g.
inf/exp(inf) = 0
by that reasoning some infinities are `greater' than others. I'm also pretty sure that last time I spoke with a maths grad they were telling me that there's much more formal ways to prove that's the case.
Its all about limits. Think about the two functions f(x)=X and f(x)=x^2. Intuitively you know that x^2 gets bigger faster, so if you consider x^2 going to infinity and x going to infinity both of these eventually become infinity but X^2 is a bigger infinity.
(going to infinity meaning X becoming closer and closer to infinity)
That's my simplistic explanation from a engineering student thats awful at math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_(mathematics) theres actually no such thing as a bigger infinity. f(x)=x^2 only approaches infinity faster than f(x)=x does. they will both only be infinitely approaching infinity, no such thing as a "bigger" infinity.
only in 1st yr of college but in calc I
The guy you quoted is wrong, but doesn't mean you're correct. f(x) = x & f(x) = x^(2) can be mapped to each other, so they're the equally "sized" of infinity (we'll ignore that there's conception of "size" with what we're talking about, but that'll pickle your brain if you spend too much time thinking about it).
But f(x) = x is a "countable" infinity (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countable_infinity) while you can map all of the numbers between 0 and 1 to the "uncountable" infinity (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_infinity ). This is more logic theory than all that advanced of mathematics, but, really, it will pickle your brain. That isn't a joke, as the stuff doesn't make any concrete "sense" in the physical world and are mathematical constructs (though important in Set theory). So don't get too hung on up on it.
No he is correct. He is saying that there can be no number greater than infinity, you are referring to the cardinality of a infinite set. It's true this could be different for infinite sets but that is a different topic.
EPT
