On Wed, 04 Jul 2018 12:31:16 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: [...] >> Ah, I see we're not going to leave it alone. In that case, >> "indefinite" >> is a "number", in that it was a quantity you cited along with the other >> two. If you'd prefer to call it a "quantity", that's fine with me. >> Talk about pedantic... > > I've had debates with people about whether "infinity" is a number or > not, but I've never yet heard anyone say that "indefinite" is a number. > Hmm. This could be interesting.
What, haven't you ever raced somebody to see who can count to 100 fastest? "One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one hundred!" Clearly "indefinite" is just a synonym for "skip a few". For what it's worth, in the ordinary real numbers we all know and love, infinity is absolutely not a number, full stop. There's no debate about that. But there are a number (more than one, less than infinity *wink*) of areas of mathematics which treat one or more versions of infinity as entities which, for lack of a better name, I'll call "numbers". E.g. cardinal numbers, hyperreals, surreal numbers, and others. The mathematics of them is rather unintuitive. For instance, in the surreal numbers, ω is the smallest infinity; ω-1 is a separate infinity but one that you cannot get by counting up from 0, 1, 2, ... you have to start at ω and count down (by subtraction); 1+ω is just ω but ω+1 is larger than infinity. (I'm not an expert on the surreals, I may have a couple of details wrong.) -- Steven D'Aprano "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
