Re:Gabriel's Horn
by parallel on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @10:06PM
(#9729751)
Or even just a convergent infinite series. Infinitely many positive numbers that sum to a finite number.
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Re:Gabriel's Horn
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday June 16, 2015 @11:09PM
(#9729894)
People don't tend to find that unintuitive. The Greeks had a nice geometric example in a square of side length 1:
┌┬┬─┬───┬───────┐
├┘│3│ │ │
├─┘-│ │ │
│ 64│ │ │
├───┘ │ │
│ │ │
│ 3/16 │ │
│ │ │
├───────┘ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ 3/4 │
│ │
│ │
│ │
└───────────────┘
3/4 + 3/16 + 3/64 + 3/256 + ... is easy to visualize as successively filling in three quarters of an ever-smaller residual square. Intuitively, no matter how finely you detail it, you're never going to stop fitting inside the original area-1 square.edit: better text art
Now squeeze the top-left piece so it's half as wide but twice as tall (i.e. the same height as the full rectangle), and do this recursively. Same area, right? Then stack the L shapes on top of each other. Then you have one of these horns.
Re:Gabriel's Horn
by thaumasiotes on Thursday June 18, 2015 @07:27PM
(#9742195)
Huh? The horn is a three-dimensional object; the square exists in 2-space. You can't make the horn from pieces of the square even if you allow deformation.
I don't think that's paradoxical. We deal with convergent infinite series all the time in everyday life.
10/3(3.333...) is 3 + 3/10 + 3/100/ + 3/1000 + 3/10000...
π(3.1415...) is 3 + 1/10 + 4/100 + 1/1000 + 5/10000...
Its quite easy to see that both of these series will be finite, and many numbers, lets say 4 or 3 + 5/10 will be greater than either of them.
Or in general, any infinite size n-dimensional structure can be embedded in some finite size n+1 dimensional structure.
This sum's finiteness seems pretty intuitive:
9 + 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.09 + 0.009...
Re:Gabriel's Horn
by sesquipedalian on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @11:56AM
(#9732731)
Good example. Minor nitpick, you listed 0.09 twice.