[lit-ideas] Re: Grice's Realm
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:59:30 -0700
JL writes
Cfr. "Infinity", or as mathematicians prefer,
"∞"
and "א" (aleph).
These symbols are _not_ equivalent. And you've left out 'Aleph null,' or
'Aleph sub-naught,' as my grade school English teacher used to say.
This is א with zero as a subscript, an image I can't produce with the
current technology. It denotes the smallest infinite cardinal number.
There's a useful image of it (which could be blown up to poster size) at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_null#Aleph-naught>
Perhaps there's a use for א alone (other than its use as a
representation of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet), but I can't
do the math to determine if there is.
This is a quote from the Wiki article.
'The aleph numbers differ from the infinity (∞) commonly found in
algebra and calculus. Alephs measure the sizes of sets; infinity, on the
other hand, is commonly defined as an extreme limit of the real number
line (applied to a function or sequence that "diverges to infinity" or
"increases without bound"), or an extreme point of the extended real
number line.'
Robert Paul,
The Cantor Institute
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