Thursday, March 20, 2014

Interesting Math Stuff #11: Taming Infinity

Please Watch this Video: Taming Infinity Video

This video covers one of the topics we went over a couple weeks ago: convergent geometric infinite sequences. The way Miss V explained it was like this: If I take one half, than I add half of one half (one fourth), then I add half of one fourth (one eighth)....for all eternity, the answer will be a natural number.

This raises some confusion and also some awe. When I think of a situation like this, I think that however many you add, the number will keep approaching the natural number, but will never reach it. So if the presumed natural number that is the sum is N, than shouldn't the sum of any given amount of numbers by <N? I suppose that to fully understand this concept, I would have to completely understand the nature of infinity. Is infinity a number or a concept? Because adding any number of terms to this a convergent geometric infinite sequence would logically result it <N, then  I guess infinity must be a concept.

Maybe by the time I finish AP Calculus, I will finally be able to wrap by head around the idea of infinity.

Math joke of the day:
Q: Did you hear about the statistician who invented a device to measure the weight of trees?
A: It is referred to as the log scale.

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