Hello Angus, Jan, Panda et al,
Uit die argiewe van die BBC se argiewe van “In our Time” word die volgende aangebied:
"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the number between 1 and -1, which has strange and uniquely beguiling qualities. Shakespeare’s King Lear warned, “Nothing will come of nothing”. The poet and priest John Donne said from the pulpit, “The less anything is, the less we know it: how invisible, unintelligible a thing is nothing”, and the English monk and historian William of Malmesbury called them “dangerous Saracen magic”. They were all talking about zero, the number or symbol that had been part of the mathematics in the East for centuries but was finally taking hold in Europe.
Zero.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the nature and existence of mathematical infinity. Jonathan Swift encapsulated the counter-intuitive character of infinity with insouciant style:
'So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas on him that prey
And these hath smaller fleas to bite ‘em
And so proceed ad infinitum.'
Alas, the developing utility mathematicians put to the idea of infinity did not find the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes quite so relaxed. When confronted with a diagram depicting an infinite solid whose volume was finite, he wrote, 'To understand this for sense, it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or logician, but that he should be mad.' Yet philosophers and mathematicians have continued to grapple with the unending, and it is a core concept in modern maths.
So, what is mathematical infinity? Are some infinities bigger than others? And does infinity exist in nature?"
Daar kan ook na “imaginary numbers” asook negatiewe getalle gekyk word.
Baie dankie
Wouter