On Oct 1, 2008, at 1:52 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
One day one of the king announces a competition open to men. The award
to the winner is marrying the princess, the king's daughter. A
mathematician and an engineer enter the competition. The competition
turns out to be this: the princess will stand at one end of a room and
the competitors will walk to the princess from the other end in such a
way that each step they take will be half of the previous step.
Knowing that it would take infinitely many steps to reach the princes
and he will never reach the princes, the mathematician gives up
immediately. But the engineer starts to walk to the princess. They ask
the engineer: Look, this smart mathematician immediately figured out
that he would never reach the princess and did not even try. Why are
doing this? The engineer replies: In the end, I will get sufficiently
close for all practical purposes.
Sabri
^^^^^^^
CB: Yeah, that first part is known as Zeno's paradox. Hercules was in
the original.
[s/Zeno's paradox/Zeno's paradox in the Western world/]
Achilles (not Hercules), and also a tortoise, IIRC. But in Sabri's
version, the paradox is relaxed and a solution possible, since the
mathematician or engineer's foot has some non-zero dimension/
extension. ;-)
--ravi
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