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My exact words were: The engineers who designed these systems all made frequent use of the notion of infinity, particularly in their use of limits and calculus

My exact words were: The engineers who designed these systems all made frequent use of the notion of infinity, particularly in their use of limits and calculus. Do you disbelieve that engineers make frequent use of limits and calculus? Do you disbelieve that notions of limit, derivative, and integral are contingent on the idea of infinity? Why should anyone answer your questions while you continue to ignore mine?

mojuba 17y ago
Programming languages, compiler design and construction, operating systems, networking on all levels including protocol design, traffic analysis, etc; multithreading, games, browsers, document management systems, financial applications, telephony, CAD's, a lot of web development - are among the areas I worked in during my career. (I never touched signal processing though.) Although in some narrow areas I've seen non-trivial calculus, but I barely remember anything that involves infinities and is significant for the solution.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  You're still not answering my questions. Do you believe that no engineers use limits or calculus? Do you believe that limits and calculus are unrelated to the idea of infinity? Now you seem to be saying: "I have never, myself, seen the concept of infinity used to solve a problem in a way I deem significant. Therefore, infinity does not exist and is not useful to anybody." If I said the same thing about the number 65536, would it force you to program only 8-bit processors for the rest of your life? Based on some of your earlier statements, I'm going to guess that we're using different definitions of the word "infinity." I'd guess that to you, the word "infinity" means something like "the largest possible number, denoted ∞." I'd also guess that, in your claim about calculus above, you mean something like "I have never seen a calculus problem whose solution required you to write down an ∞." Am I right?

mojuba 17y ago

Programming languages, compiler design and construction, operating systems, networking on all levels including protocol design, traffic analysis, etc; multithreading, games, browsers, document management systems, financial applications, telephony, CAD's, a lot of web development - are among the areas I worked in during my career. (I never touched signal processing though.) Although in some narrow areas I've seen non-trivial calculus, but I barely remember anything that involves infinities and is significant for the solution.

mnemonicsloth 17y ago
You're still not answering my questions. Do you believe that no engineers use limits or calculus? Do you believe that limits and calculus are unrelated to the idea of infinity? Now you seem to be saying: "I have never, myself, seen the concept of infinity used to solve a problem in a way I deem significant. Therefore, infinity does not exist and is not useful to anybody." If I said the same thing about the number 65536, would it force you to program only 8-bit processors for the rest of your life? Based on some of your earlier statements, I'm going to guess that we're using different definitions of the word "infinity." I'd guess that to you, the word "infinity" means something like "the largest possible number, denoted ∞." I'd also guess that, in your claim about calculus above, you mean something like "I have never seen a calculus problem whose solution required you to write down an ∞." Am I right?