55: Order in the Court (Transfinite Ordinal Numbers)

Breaking Math Podcast

English - January 14, 2021 17:25 - 31 minutes - 42.9 MB - ★★★★ - 316 ratings
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Previous Episode: 54: Oodles (Large Numbers)

Next Episode: 56: More Sheep than You Can Count (Transfinite Cardinal Numbers)

As a child, did you ever have a conversation that went as follows:

"When I grow up, I want to have a million cats"

"Well I'm gonna have a billion billion cats"

"Oh yeah? I'm gonna have infinity cats"

"Then I'm gonna have infinity plus one cats"

"That's nothing. I'm gonna have infinity infinity cats"

"I'm gonna have infinity infinity infinity infinity *gasp* infinity so many infinities that there are infinity infinities plus one cats"

What if I told you that you were dabbling in the transfinite ordinal numbers? So what are ordinal numbers? What does "transfinite" mean? And what does it mean to have a number one larger than another infinite number?

[Featuring: Sofía Baca; Diane Baca]

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This episode is released under a Creative Commons attribution sharealike 4.0 international license. For more information, go to CreativeCommoms.org

This episode features the song "Buffering" by "Quiet Music for Tiny Robots"