RE: Thinking about infinity
April 28, 2016 at 7:31 am
(This post was last modified: April 28, 2016 at 7:48 am by Ignorant.)
(April 28, 2016 at 5:48 am)robvalue Wrote: Thank you
That's an unusual question! You wouldn't be able to write down the "first term", with n=infinity, because that would correspond to the "last term" the other way round. And there isn't one. Neither could you produce the first 10 terms. It would take infinitely many terms before you reached any particular number you wanted to...
Do you think that this makes a geometric series more akin to the coastline problem? I.e. A geometric series as a descriptor of a reality, rather than a reality itself. In short, is a geometric serial division of a line segment a notional infinity (i.e. potential infinity) rather than an infinity of a finite length?