logoalt Hacker News

ameliusyesterday at 4:43 PM2 repliesview on HN

The problem with infinity is that it's a hack. It is basically the NULL pointer of mathematicians. An instance of a number that has a special meaning that breaks the abstraction of numbers.

If you want to do things with infinity, fine, but then do it properly and write things like lim x->inf (your expression with x here)


Replies

computablyyesterday at 4:51 PM

> An instance of a number that has a special meaning.

Not really. There are infinitely many infinities. Infinite numbers are not particularly more special than real numbers, complex numbers, matrices, functions/operators, etc.

BigTTYGothGFyesterday at 5:23 PM

> An instance of a number that has a special meaning

Lots of numbers have special meanings. The ancients didn't think 1 was a number, and later lots of people didn't (and some still don't) think 0 was a number.