The magical world of infinities

Jagadeeshan, Shashidhar (2016) The magical world of infinities. At Right Angles, 5 (2). pp. 17-23.

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Abstract

In the previous article we encountered the strange world of infinities, where a lot of our intuitive sense of how infinite sets should behave started breaking down. We saw for example that infinite sets can have subsets which have as many elements as the original set; we also saw our intuition about length breaking down. No matter what the lengths of the two lines are, they ended up having the same number of points. Moreover, all the examples of infinite sets we encountered ended up having the same number of elements. You might naturally assume that there is only one kind of infinity – which is what perhaps you had assumed right from the beginning?

Item Type: Articles in APF Magazines
Authors: Jagadeeshan, Shashidhar
Document Language:
Language
English
Uncontrolled Keywords: Infinity, Set, Cardinality, Countable, Natural number, Real number, Unit interval, Continuum, One-one Correspondence, Injective function
Subjects: Natural Sciences > Mathematics
Divisions: Azim Premji University > University Publications > At Right Angles
Full Text Status: Public
URI: http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/1430
Publisher URL: http://apfstatic.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-...

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