4 ms·
mblase'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 lengt
by user24 16y ago
mblase'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.