Is Infinity a number?

[Rp0thejester]

[Paul-R]

Time to revive this thread. I came across this little snippet of information about it's divisibility (just made that word up!) and the fact it's a whole number which I thought was interesting.

Graham's number is bigger than the googolplex. It's so big, the Universe does not contain enough stuff on which to write its digits: it's literally too big to write. But this number is finite, it's also an whole number, and despite it being so mind-bogglingly huge we know it is divisible by 3 and ends in a 7.

https://plus.maths.org/content/too-big- ... big-graham

[Paul-R]

Another number which I had not heard of before. Not as big as some of the numbers we've discussed but still pretty big. This is the Dedekind number.

Until recently only eight were known about but a ninth has just been found. Apparently it's fiendishly difficult to calculate and its discovery this soon after the eighth one (a mere 32 years ago) was slightly surprising.

D(9), as it's known, is 42 digits long and here it is in its entirety:
286386577668298411128469151667598498812366

More information here: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ninth-ded ... oblem.html

[mickthemaverick]

I couldn't access the maths site Paul as my anti-virus software declared it to be infected with a phishing virus, however reading through the physics site I found quite interesting but I honestly couldn't help thinking: "Why?"

[MattBLancs]

This just appeared:

What is the greatest unit of weight?

Yottagramme (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 g or 10^24 g), which is approximately the mass of all seawater on Earth]

Where do you put all the fish whilst you are weighing that!?

[myglaren]

Is Infinity a number?

Turns out it is a NIssan

[CitroJim]

Infinity is a number... It's a tired 8 lying on its side fast asleep...

[Paul-R]

Time to revive this thread - redux.

Just been listening to a podcast about a number that is so huge that it threatens to break mathematics. Again, I'll just quote what someone else wrote.

We’re brushing up against the edge of mathematics with the uncovering of a number so large it’s hard to even describe. Busy Beaver numbers are used to describe the longest possible run-times of ‘Turing machines’ - a theoretical model of computation conceived by Alan Turing. These numbers are surprisingly hard to figure out. But after uncovering the fifth Busy Beaver number in 2021, an online community of mathematicians now thinks they’ve figured out the sixth number - and it’s beyond massive. What does this mean for the nature of mathematics?

https://www.newscientist.com/podcasts/h ... ncer-risk/

[CitroJim]

Gosh! That's just done my brain in - or what was left of it...