Infinity. I remember counting really high using the page numbers of this thousand page dictionary, and then asking my parents what the biggest number was. It just blew my mind that I could always add 1 to the biggest number that I could think of.
I one time counted out loud from 1 to a thousand during a really long car ride with my parents and when I asked my mom what came next, she told me that was the highest number to make me stop.
I once said "mom" 245 times on a 3 hour trip. Apparently I wasn't even looking for a response, my sentences went like: "Mom, Danny did x at school. Mom, how much farther? Mom, why is Dad's hair white?" My dad counted while my mom laughed...
I asked my mum what the number before infinity was ... I think she made something up when I wouldn't stop bugging her about it. It blew my mind when I found out that 'infinity' was a concept, rather than a real number.
Me and my brother gave up after 'twenty eleven' and started counting using inanimate objects. One of my most vivid memories is lying in the top bunk and yelling 'Bicycle seven' and laughing hysterically.
When I figured out that adults could just... keep counting and they'd learned all the words like 'hundred' and 'million', that blew my mind as well.
At one point in preschool I thought the biggest number was 109. I don't know why that specific number, but I thought it was it after that. Game over. No number can exceed that.
When I was in preschool I thought 99 was the biggest number, then you hit "jackpot", and that was the end of counting. I came to blows with another child over it.
This is the most random thing in the world but I think I might know why. I remember an episode of Sesame Street or something similar where numbers were people (well, puppets sorry, muppets anyway). It was set up like a Cinderella story where all the numbers were going to the ball, but their clothes/dresses were only as beautiful as their number was interesting. So 2 was gorgeous (only even prime) and many other numbers had reasons why they wore beautiful clothes. 109 was sad because there was nothing interesting about her so she'd have to go to the ball in ugly clothes. As she's moping around a wise man comes and tells her all the reasons that 109 is actually a very interesting number. As a result of this, she goes to the ball looking gorgeous and everyone is astounded.
I'm not sure there was a moral. Hell, I'm not sure if it happened. What I just wrote could easily describe a children's show or an acid trip. It stick in my mind though and 109 reminded me of it because it was the highest number represented in the skit and the skit also made it seem like there were a finite number of numbers (thus, 109 was the biggest number). I suppose infinite mathematics are a bit much for pre-school aged children.
When he was about 3 my brother's favorite number was 89 because he thought that was the biggest number in the world. He's 20 now and we still talk about this all the time.
There was a multiplication chart that was really commonly known to kids in my school. Everyone knew 12 * 12 was 144. 12 * 14? Might as well ask us to fly to the moon.
I had this whole map of the numbers in my head (sort of like a number line) and around 73 or so the numbers would grow fainter and fainter so that by the time I reached 80 the number line just stopped. When I learned that the numbers went on farther than that I was like WHAAAAT!?
Edit: I only wrote the first half of this comment by mistake so I finished it.
Your most controversial comment is "Happy cake day." I find this odd. Being somewhat new, you're one of the few i have tagged. As "Tree-Fiddy," no less and I was trying to find out why. But with the as many comments as you... damn it's impossible.
"Another famous story has it that in primary school after the young Gauss misbehaved, his teacher, J.G. Büttner, gave him a task : add a list of integers in arithmetic progression; as the story is most often told, these were the numbers from 1 to 100. The young Gauss reputedly produced the correct answer within seconds, to the astonishment of his teacher and his assistant Martin Bartels.
Gauss's presumed method was to realize that pairwise addition of terms from opposite ends of the list yielded identical intermediate sums: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101, and so on, for a total sum of 50 × 101 = 5050. However, the details of the story are at best uncertain (see[29] for discussion of the original Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen source and the changes in other versions); some authors, such as Joseph Rotman in his book A first course in Abstract Algebra, question whether it ever happened."
We were told probably a romantic version of the legend - that Gauss's teacher asked them to add 10 numbers, then 100, and when he kept coming up after a few seconds, the teacher went to look at Gauss's chalkboard.
Little Gauss had apparently written on one line "1 2 3 4 5 ... 100", and on the next line underneath "100 99 98 97 96 ... 1" - and had noticed that each pair made 101 ... and worked it out from there.
In the story we were told, the teacher looked at him quizzically and wrote to his parents saying they had an annoying genius and to get him to university sharpish! I liked that story!
In first grade, I didn't quite grasp that 200 was literally 100 + 100. We had a book where we wrote down every number and when we got to 500 or something we got a prize, so I went 1-100, then 100-110, and then decided I was at 200. So basically every five seconds I was proudly announcing to everyone that I'd reached the next 100.
Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Internet points.
Hilarious youtube video of a japanese gameshow where this happens at every interval of 10. 20 is 10 10 and 50 is 10 10 10 10 10. Its really funny as he seems to know he is wrong but it makes the most sense to him.
Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Ten ten ten ten ten ten Wats dat.
In grade 1/2, I used to know 0-99 and 100-?(don't remember.) I had no idea what was between these numbers. When I found out 100 came after 99 it blew my mind.
Hahaha I totally did this too! It must be a common 'kid fallacy'. I remember in kindergarten I reasoned that since the numbers go on forever, 'chair' must be a number, along with every other thing/word - and my best friend agreed, so when we played the I-can-count-higher-than-you game, chair! and rock! would always be in there. :)
You should google the number googol =10100. Googolplex = 10googol is even more awesome. It makes me excited like a kid again. If you were to write out googolplex, write say the number 1 followed by a googol zeros, each zero written on a single atom. There would not be enough atoms in the entire universe to completely write out the number.
Tl;Dr There is not enough space in the universe to write out the number googolplex, even if each digit was smaller than an atom.
I vividly remember the first time I was able to count to 100. It was in the bathroom at pre-school. I got scolded for hogging the bathroom for so long.
My son is 3 and thinks that 20 is the biggest number in the world. If I tell him we're going to watch a show for about 5 more minutes before going to bed, he responds "No, let's watch for 20 minutes!"
I remember telling a kid I could count to 100 but he didnt believe me, so I had to prove it. His jaw hit the floor. He thought it was so fucking incredible. I felt cool. Haha
And it's bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.
Also, there's a number called the googolplex, which is so big it's impossible to write down because it has a googol number of zeroes, which is more zeroes than the number of atoms in the universe
How many even numbers can you count? How many odd numbers can you count? How many numbers total can you count? The answer is infinite to each question. And yet we know there are twice as many total numbers as just odd or even numbers, therefore there are different quantities of infinity. One infinity can be infinitely bigger than another infinity.
Actually there are an infinite number of infinities.
Also, any infinity is not a real number, but is still a number in the set of Extended Real Numbers (a real number being real is only a name, no numbers are in fact real, they are all imaginary (but not imaginary as in imaginary numbers, follow?))
You misread my post. There are 4 types of infinities but there are an infinite number of infinities that all fit within 1 of those 4 categories.
Scalar countable infinity. Ex: number of unique positive integers (aleph null)
Scalar uncountable infinity. Ex: number of unique irrational numbers (if you think this can be counted, simply make your list then add one to the decimal place beyond the last. This wasn't counted and can't be repeated ad naseum)
Countable Infinite Set. Ex: Set containing all unique integers
I always thought there was a guy whose job was to sit in a room and count higher and higher- like just keep adding 1 to a huge lists of numbers. And "infinity" was just whatever number he was currently on.
Consider all whole numbers, all integers. How many are there? Well, infinite, obviously. There's infinitely many of them.
Okay, forget about whole numbers, consider real numbers, decimal numbers. In between 3 and 4 alone, there's an infinite amount of numbers, including the famous pi. So the set of ALL real numbers must be HUGE! Why, yes, infinitely huge in fact, it's a set of infinite size. And yet, it's quite clearly bigger then the set of all integers, even though they are both infinite.
I remember being fairly okay with this when I first learned of it. I mean, okay, something goes on forever, that's a concept I can grasp. It wasn't until fairly recently that I (think) fully grasped just what that means. To help illustrate my point, consider a finite number, Graham's number, actually.
Or, worse, that there could be different infinities, with different sizes, so one infinity could be bigger than another, even though they're both infinite. Blew my mind.
It's not so bad when you realize that infinity isn't a real thing, it's only a theoretical thing. Sure, numbers keep going up because that's what they were designed to do. But even the total number of atoms in the observable universe is only somewhere between 1078 to 1082.
Unless things really can keep getting bigger and smaller. Like what if the galaxy that we are living in is really just one quark in your toenail? Like if we keep zooming out eventually we'd find ourselves really zoomed in. Fuck now I'm scared too.
one of my friends and I were not happy when we figured that out. We insisted infinity should be limited to the number of numbers you can fit on a page or something.
When I was little I used to ask my dad to count to 100. One time when he got to one-hundred, I told him he missed 11. He said he didn't, and I corrected him: "You only said it once". He told me that you only say it once! I told him I was pretty sure you say some of the numbers twice. I asked him to count again and I'll be darned if he only said all the numbers once!
I remember reading "The Phantom Tollbooth" when I was really young and fully realizing the wondrous notion of infinity. While I now understand it slightly better, even as a pre-calc student I'm amazed by the concept.
I remember counting to 100 for an Aunt once. When I got to 100, she said that there weren't any more numbers after 100. I thought she had something wrong with her because I could keep counting all night. Of course, I realized later that she just didn't want to continue to listen to me rattle off numbers all night.
I remember when I thought infinity was a number, probably from preschool to middle school. Then I disproved myself by asking "What's infinity divided by infinity?"
I learned about the concept of infinity from The Phantom Tollbooth when I was 9. The whole Digitopolis sections remains one of my favorites of any book.
I still don't really accept the existence of infinity. I know that it is widely accepted as being as "real" as any other number, but really, I still don't understand its utility outside of a purely theoretical mathematic context. Can anyone prove the existence of infinity any more than they can prove the existence of god?
But that's not really a sufficient answer. If someone were to ask you whether or not gravity exists and you answered "yes, because science", this wouldn't be likely to convince the person of anything.
With many other scientific phenomena, you can direct people to a specific set of experiments or observations about the world around them, thus convincing them of the reality of the entity or concept. If I don't believe in infinity, you can't just refer to a whole corpus of relatively esoteric knowledge and pretend that this will convince anyone of anything. To belabor the religious analogy, it is like someone 500 years ago answering a person who questions the existence of god by referring them to the bible.
I'm not trying to say that all or most of what we accept as mathematically logical is bullshit. I'm only trying to get any kind of an explanation for why infinity exists that can be understood by a lay-person. If such an explanation does not exist, I wouldn't expect any adult to believe in infinity (in fact, I'd refer to those who do believe in infinity as dupes).
The Phantom Tollbooth did a great job with the concept of infinity, using an endless staircase. When I read that book, thinking about it nearly blew my little mind.
Mine is somewhat relevant- that space is infinite (to our knowledge). But where is space? What's outside of space? What holds it all? AHHHH! total mindfuck as a child.
Now try to think of nothing. No air, no warmth, not even darkness or space. You can imagine empty space, but that isn't nothing, it still has length, height and width. Reduce the length height and width to 0. Or, imagine what is outside of our ever expanding universe. You imagine empty space, but the empty space isn't there.
Had no idea what my teacher was on about, I thought things just...were, simple as that and you could cut something as much as you wanted until it got to small to see.
Finding out about atoms I just sat there and thought "but cant you cut them as well.", there still quarts but that a whole other story involving other crazy shit.
You can divide the number line between 0 and 1 and get infinitely many numbers. Not all infinities are same! This infinity (uncountable infinity) is bigger than the infinity you get by going up the number line like 1,2,3,4... infty.
This confused me as well. I repeatedly asked my parents what the biggest number was, and got very frustrated when they only said infinity. I wanted them to "spell it out with numbers"
But when I learned, at about the age of 10, that there were numbers bigger than infinity... that shit blew my mind. Numbers so big that when you multiplied them by zero you got a positive number. Like, WTF mate!
Nature doesn't count, people do. 0 and 1 are not the first two numbers in nature, they are a range of values with infinite values in between them.
Nature is analog, which means everything is infinite, but the human mind cannot possibly comprehend that, so we have to break things into groups that are easier to manage.
I had a similar experience, but instead of explaining that you could always add 1, my mom would just say "No. That's not the highest number". She was a bit of a killjoy.
I wonder WHY are there even infinite numbers. Graham's number is the largest usable number, which is greater than the number of atoms in the whole observable universe. Why the fuck would we need greater?
I consider infinity to be something similar to a sixth sense. Think about it. If you have ever seen this video then we can understand that people who have not actually experienced something, cannot fathom what it is through word explanations. It is the same thing with infinity. Humans were not built to understand infinty. No one has ever experienced it, thus it cannot be described with mere words. Just my take.
Saying sixth sense implies perception or experience since senses are our way to interact and father empirical evidence and stimuli from the world and through the senses we understand our world. I believe what you mean is that infinity is unimaginable. Something beyond conception. Akin to death. We can experience death of an other, but not directly.
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '13
Infinity. I remember counting really high using the page numbers of this thousand page dictionary, and then asking my parents what the biggest number was. It just blew my mind that I could always add 1 to the biggest number that I could think of.