this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Where is i? Is it safe? Is it alright?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Please stop talking about your imaginary girlfriend, it's embarrassing honestly.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nope, you fell for the classic sibling blunder:

What about INFINITY PLUS ONE!?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

It's Infinity! Infinity -1? also infinity! Well what about infinity times infinity? Believe it or not, infinity! ♾️

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Infinity gangsta when aleph null walks in

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What about infinity times zero?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

For that one we're going to call my good friend L'Hôpital. That guy rules!

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Last time I saw this kind of challenge it was on reddit and I just replied with ℝ, but people brought up that this leaves out complex numbers. I'll now contend, however, that any number not included in that isn't real.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Quaternions hello?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What about quaternions and octonions and ...

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

This image goes so hard

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Just like birds, complex numbers aren't real!

Screw you sqrt(-1), you aren't even a real number, you poser!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Aren't there numbers past (plus/minus) infinity? Last I hear there's some omega stuff (for denoting numbers "past infinity") and it's not even the usual alpha-beta-omega flavour.

Come to think of it, is there even a notation for "the last possible number" in math? aka something that you just can't tack "+1" at the end of to make a new number?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What you're probably thinking of is Ordinal numbers.

As for your second question, I don't think any "last number" could exist unless we explicitly declared one. And even then... I'm not sure what utility there would be in declaring a "last number".

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Which of the infinities? There are many, many :D

The smallest infinity is the size of the natural numbers. That infinty, Aleph zero, is smaller than the infinity of the real numbers, Aleph one. "etc."

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Which of the infinities? There are many, many :D

Oh no! Please don't tell me there are infinity infinities!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately yes there are and it's a very big infinity of infinties....

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wait, they ran out of greek letters and started using Hebrew ones now? When did that happen?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

There is nothing "past" infinity, infinity is more a concept than a number, there are however many different kinds of infinity. And for the record, infinity + 1 = infinity, those are completely equal. Infinity + infinity = infinity x 2 = still the same kind of infinity. Infinity times infinity is debatably a different kind of infinity but there are fairly simple ways of showing it can be counted the same.

Essentially the number of numbers between 1 and 2 is the same as the number of numbers between 0 and infinity. They are still infinite.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hi, I'm a mathematician. My specialty is Algebra, and my research includes work with transfinites. While it's commonly said that infinity "isn't a number" I tend to disagree with this, since it often limits how people think about it. Furthermore, I always find it odd when people offer up alternatives to what infinity is; are numbers never concepts?

Regardless, here's the thing you're actually concretely wrong about: there are provably things bigger than infinity, and they are all bigger infinities. Furthermore, there are multiple kinds of transfinite algebra. Cardinal algebra behaves mostly like how you described, except every transfinite cardinal has a successor (e.g. There are countably many natural numbers and uncountably many complex numbers). Ordinal algebra, on the other hand, works very differently: if ω is the ordinal that corresponds to countable infinity, then ω+1>ω.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

i isn't a real number, you imagined it

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (1 children)

From gatekeeping to gaslighting in 2 comments. Not bad!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

What a girlboss

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

not a real number

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh you like math? Name all the sets of sets that don’t include themselves.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Russell is that you? Please stop breaking my formal systems

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

[0-9]*\.?[0-9]*

edit: ok no empty strings [0-9]+\.?[0-9]*

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That regex implies “” is a number

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

If I had a nickel for every time that happened I'd have "" nickels.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I didn't realize '.' is a number.

\([0-9]+\.[0-9]\)?[0-9]* is more accurate I think.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I thought it was 'R', for the set of all real numbers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Oh, so complex numbers are not numbers now?!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

You also have to remember to put the +C at the end

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (4 children)
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