this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] Mr_Fish 89 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It seems in your equations, you conjugated it.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nope, you fell for the classic sibling blunder:

What about INFINITY PLUS ONE!?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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 11 months ago (1 children)

Infinity gangsta when aleph null walks in

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What about infinity times zero?

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

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

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 11 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] 30 points 11 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Quaternions hello?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] zzx 4 points 11 months ago

This image goes so hard

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 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 11 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (6 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] 25 points 11 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] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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] 5 points 11 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] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] DoomBot5 5 points 11 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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[–] kerrigan778 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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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[–] KmlSlmk64 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

IIRC Depends if you talk about cardinal or ordinal numbers. What I remember: In cardinal numbers (the normal numbers we think of, which denote quantity, etc.) have their maximum in infinity. But in ordinal numbers (which denote order - first, second, etc.) Can go past infinity - the first after infinity is omega. Then omega +1. And then some bigger stuff, which I don't remember much, like aleph 0 and more.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hi! I'm a mathematician, and if you want to know more about infinity, I recommend this video: https://youtu.be/23I5GS4JiDg

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[–] hansl 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] zzx 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Russell is that you? Please stop breaking my formal systems

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[–] Stupidmanager 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

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

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That regex implies “” is a number

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 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] 9 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] waigl 7 points 11 months ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Fred.

(∀x:Number(x)=T)(Name(x)="Fred")

I name every number Fred.

[–] blanketswithsmallpox 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Which negative infinity or positive infinity includes zero?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Brackets and a comma like that indicate a range, not just a list of 2 values

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

But those are parentheses, are they not? I was taught intervals using square brackets and semicolon. While parentheses are used for coordinates and tuples. The square brackets indicates inclusion of the boundary number.

Ie. the statement "2

Update: apparently either lemmy or my app (boost) wasn't that excited for my less than signs, and just skipped the rest of the comment. And here I had spent time copying both "less than or equal to" and infinity signs, since my keyboard doesn't seem to have them... For the time being pls disregard the comment above, while I figure out how to write math on lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's likely just you were taught a different notation. Personally I was taught (x, y) can mean both coordinates x and y or a range from x-y (non inclusive), just depends on context which it is. Brackets like [x,y] I was taught are for inclusive ranges (i.e., x and y are included in the range)

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

It's certainly between them somewhere

[–] bfg9k 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is actually zero as well as negative zero for reasons beyond my comprehension

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