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Re:Endless Horse by naet on Friday December 30, 2022 @02:11AM (#34182686)
Infinity is an infinitely high number. What is Infinity plus one? It must still be Infinity, since it's already infinitely high and can't go any higher.

But if you have an odd number and add one, you get an even number (and vice versa). For Infinity = Infinity + 1 to hold true, Infinity must be both odd and even.

Or something like that. It's probably more accurate to say Infinity is neither odd nor even. If you add 2+2+2+2... up to infinity, it might appear even. But that could also be equivalent to 1+3+1+3+1... to infinity, which would be alternating even and odd. Or 1+2+2+2+2... which would always be odd.

Infinite quantities bend or break a lot of typical rules that other rational numbers follow.

Re:Endless Horse by Swizec on Friday December 30, 2022 @03:07AM (#34183000)
If I remember my college set theory correctly, this is because there are infinite infinities.

2+2+2+… is a different infinity than 2+1+2+1+…

You can construct infinite sets of numbers that do not overlap. Odd vs. Even infinity is the example our professor used in class to show the concept. I don’t remember enough to replicate here.

Re:Endless Horse by greggertt on Friday December 30, 2022 @03:56AM (#34183271)
Wow way to kill the enjoyment of a nonsense verse
Re:Endless Horse by Swizec on Friday December 30, 2022 @06:00AM (#34183916)
Nah the verse was wonderful, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Re:Endless Horse by thaumasiotes on Friday December 30, 2022 @06:28AM (#34184078)
In the ordinal-numbers model that your notation leans toward, 2+2+2+... and 2+1+2+1+... are definitely the same infinity, both ω.

On the other hand, you reminded me that conditionally convergent series may converge to different sums depending on how you choose to group their terms, which is fun. (That is, [(s_1 + s_2) + s_3 + (s_4 + s_5) + s_6 + ...] may have a different sum than [(s_1 + s_2) + (s_3 + s_4) + (s_5 + s_6) + ...] does.)†

† I hope this is true; I can't find a cite for it. The more famous theorem is that you can get any sum you want by reordering the terms, but I think regrouping is good enough to get you different sums, if not arbitrary sums.

Re:Endless Horse by thaumasiotes on Friday December 30, 2022 @06:55AM (#34184232)
> What is Infinity plus one? It must still be Infinity, since it's already infinitely high and can't go any higher.

This is a mistake. That is how the extended reals behave. There are other systems. The diagonalization argument will already tell you that if you're at infinity, you can still go higher. This is also true for ordinal numbers and nonstandard analysis. It is the general case; the behavior in the extended reals is a special case.

> But if you have an odd number and add one, you get an even number (and vice versa). For Infinity = Infinity + 1 to hold true, Infinity must be both odd and even.

This is much worse; your conclusion is unrelated to your premise. You would need an additional premise, that infinity is either even or odd, which you didn't bother to supply. The same argument will tell you that either (a) 1.3 is even and 2.3 is odd, or (b) 1.3 is odd and 2.3 is even. (a) and (b) are both false.