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adrian_byesterday at 5:30 PM0 repliesview on HN

The paradoxes of Zeno are caused by his lack of understanding of the symmetry between zero and infinity. It is also possible that he actually understood more than is apparent from his paradoxes, but those were intended only to troll the other philosophers.

Zeno understood things like zero multiplied by a number being zero and a number multiplied by infinity being infinity, but he did not understood that neither of zero and infinity is stronger than the other, so that the product of zero and infinity may be any finite number, i.e. the limit of a sequence of products where one factor decreases towards zero and the other increases indefinitely can be any number.

While Zeno either ignored or faked ignorance about the existence of limits of infinite sequences, other later Ancient Greek mathematicians, like Eudoxus and Archimedes, computed several limits, so they had an intuitive understanding of their behavior, even if they did not have a comprehensive theory.