Infinity in Mathematics and Logic The notion of infinity, and the problems, both philosophical and mathematical, that arise from it have been a central concern for over two millennia. Any serious thought about the nature of space, time, God (or gods),...
Few concepts in mathematics are more fascinating or confounding than infinity. While mathematicians have a longstanding disagreement over its very definition, one can start with the notion that infinity (denoted by the symbol ∞) is an unbounded...
Set theory, and its transformation of mathematician's ideas of infinity, was mainly the work of one man, the nineteenth-century German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918). Cantor found ways to work with infinite sets, which many believed...
The term infinity conveys the mathematical concept of large without bound, and is given the symbol . As children, we learn to count, and are pleased when first we count to 10, then 100, and then 1,000. By the time we reach 1,000, we may realize that...
The concept of "infinity" is perhaps best approached through the concept of "the infinite." Intuitively, what is infinite has no end. If the universe is infinite--and you could travel forever in one direction, never reaching the edge of space--then the...
Infinity as a numerical concept is a description of unbounded growth rather than any attained quantity. In 1831, the German mathematician Gauss wrote that "the infinite is but a figure of speech; an abridged form for the statement that limits exist...
In mathematics, "infinity" is often used in contexts where it is treated as if it were a number (i.e., it counts or measures things: "an infinite number of terms") but it is a different type of "number" than the real numbers. Infinity is related to...
