(no subject)

[prog]

Heh heh, pages upon pages of people going No... NO! Aaaaaagh you're all wrong shut up about the .999... thing. This is worse/more amusing than the time that the Monty Hall problem was AOTD.

I find it interesting that the text of the article actually predicts the belief-path the doubters take... when faced with simple and easily graspable proofs, they change their minds and state that obviously this means that the number system is broken.

Comments

[daerr.livejournal.com]

If you don't believe in 0.999... then the concept of 1=0.999... can't be expressed, no? So it would seem impossible to even make a statement about 1=0.999... when using a system that doesn't have 0.999....

I suspect that there are important aspects of how we model the world that rely on infinite sequences (and that they be infinite and not just very very long). That is, that we can predict things about how the world behaves given the existence of the infinite that we wouldn't be able to do so otherwise. If this is true then that would point toward the idea of infinity as being real at some basic practical level, no? (I would assume that π would be an example of this, but I couldn't really say.)

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Exactly. 1=.999... is meaningless if you don't believe in .999...

I don't really know much about infinity. Are there solid scientific reasons for believing in it? I'm not sure that saying it's useful mathetmatically is a good argument for the existence of infinity, merely that it's a useful hypothetical idea. But again, I don't know a ton about it really.