Re: Infinity and indefinite extensibility

>> There is probably some standard terminolgy for what you are about to read.<<

Most of it comes from Cantor and set theory. Before Cantor, infinite was a process and hence the "tipped over" 8 notation. It is the programmer's endless loop written with a symbol to show there is no upper bound. This is why you see it in limits and summation of a series.

After Cantor, we got the aleph notation. The numbers are put into a set and the set is treated as a completed whole thing and not a process -- the SQL model. It gets a bit tricky when you do summation over a set instead of looping over a sequence.

If you have a test for set membership that meets certain conditions, then you do not need to mateiralize the whole set. Received on Sat May 20 2006 - 13:42:55 CDT