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Over at Everything2.com we discussed this 10 years ago: http://everything2.com/title/2%255E.5+%253D+2 http://everything2.com/title/2%255E.5+%253D+2
by vilhelm_s 16y ago
Over at Everything2.com we discussed this 10 years ago:
http://everything2.com/title/2%255E.5+%253D+2 http://everything2.com/title/2%255E.5+%253D+2
- user24 16y agomblase's explanation was a very clear way of explaining the problem, with the two parallel lines never quite touching because you can't get a line to zero length by cutting it in half repeatedly, no matter how many times you do it. Thanks for sharing.
- qntm 16y agoI actually found mblase's explanation to be just as inaccurate as the one in the original story. "Infinity is not a number and you can never get there" is never a good defence in well-formed arguments about limits. It just sidesteps the question and says that it is meaningless, incidentally doing the same to all of mathematical analysis. "Just because a series of curves tends to a limit curve doesn't mean that the series of lengths of those curves tends to the length of the limit curve" is the whole of the explanation.